Category Archives: Plants

Recycled island

Posted on April 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

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.

(via Inhabitat)

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Posted in Conservation, creative, environment, food, home, Plants, think tank, transport

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Rainbow Eucalyptus

Posted on April 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

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…

(source: Kuriositas via Notcot)

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Posted in baby creative, Conservation, environment, Plants

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Moss tables

Posted on March 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

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…

(source, via Notcot)

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Posted in art, creative, environment, home, Plants

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Greenpeace vs Nestle

Posted on March 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

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…

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Posted in advertising, baby creative, Conservation, creative, environment, food, Plants, video

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Bubble Skyscrapers

Posted on March 9, 2010 | 9 Comments

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…

(source: Inhabitat via Notcot)

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Posted in Conservation, creative, drink, environment, food, home, Plants

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The Menton Lemon Festival

Posted on February 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

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…

(source: Urlesque)

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Posted in art, creative, drink, food, Plants

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Welcome to Yosemite

Posted on February 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

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…

(source: Levine/Leavitt via Notcot, with further permission from Siobhan Squire)

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Amazing Treehouses

Posted on February 4, 2010 | 1 Comment

We’ve always loved treehouses. They fulfill everything Baby holds dear. They are ecological, usually interestingly designed, and most importantly they try to recapture our inner child.

So when we found this collection over at Treehugger (funnily enough) we had to have it.

The first three are from Baumhaus, and come from collaborations with different designers, of which the “Snake” up the tree has to be our favourite.

And this lot are a just some others we liked. The floating globe is just bizarre, but we want one. The final two are big enough to live in properly, having bedrooms, kitchens and all sorts.

So there you go. Who knew that treehouses could be so diverse? I have the feeling some of these may cost more than a normal house, but if we had the choice, we’d live up there. Climbing down a tree on your way to work every morning would certainly add something to the daily commute…

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Posted in baby creative, Conservation, creative, environment, home, Plants

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Creative tea bags

Posted on February 2, 2010 | 1 Comment

Now personally we’ve always been coffee drinkers, but this collection of tea bags might actually force us past the glorious beans and on to a new product. Some of these have been around for ages but we liked the collection.

We particularly loved cigaretteas, which are in fact tea bags but look identical to the real thing.

The tea sticks are also quite excellent since they can be taken around with you easily and also act as a stirrer, and hanger tea (below) is a lovely piece of design, and there are loads more brilliant examples.

Tea bags have always been extremely dull, functional things, so we think any attempt to make them interesting has to be a good thing…

(source: Toxel)

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Posted in baby creative, creative, drink, home, Plants

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Baby saves Puma

Posted on January 25, 2010 | Leave a comment

Here at Baby, we always like to make sure our involvement in third-sector affairs is as hands-on as possible, but this usually just applies to the way we deal with our clients. One of our more adventurous account men is however going rather further, and is trekking around South America. So click through for the full story…

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