EcoChic Eindhoven
Beauty, in and of itself, is good for the planet, but beautiful things that improve the world in other ways too are priceless. The world-renowned Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands specializes in design that fosters the well-being of humans, focus-shifting from the products to the people who use them. Design is broken down into categories such as Man and Well-Being, Man and Living, Man and Leisure, Man and Mobility, Man and Public Space and so on. No where is this more apparent than in their Sustainable Design Program, which seeks to develop creative design that is beautiful as well as good for the planet and its people.
Among those the Trendease Team discovered at Eindhoven’s recent 2006 Graduation Galleries are these young designers, many of them short-listed for the Sustainable Design Award, powered by Dyson.
Why Waste Energy in Recycling? - Let’s start with raw materials. Rick Claassen’s Solar Oven, winner of the Sustainable Design Award, is uniquely built for recycling old plastic products without traditional energy consumption, an ecologically-friendly way for developing countries to turn plastic waste into useful, and often pleasing to the eye, products. Everybody wins. Claassen has also designed a system to find and convert other forms of waste locally available in the developing world.
The Walls Around You Might Move - With Harold de Bonth’s Build and Rebuild brick system, you can change the layout and number of rooms in your home quickly and easily. Bonth provides organically shaped bricks with a new kind of connection to make it easy to assemble/disassemble walls and alter your environment as you need, or simply desire.
Grow Locally - Would love to have a garden, but climate and space won’t permit? Daniël Schipper’s Vouwkas is a lightweight, flexible, folding greenhouse that allows city dwellers to grow their own plants and vegetables on balconies, roof terraces and in small municipal gardens. Looking like an alien landing pod and made out of recyclable materials, this greenhouse can grow with the plants it contains, thanks to its modular design. This design combines a local production concept with a recyclable product.
The Kitchen of Terrestrial Mechanics - Natural processes and products are integrated into the design of John Arndt’s kitchen in a symbiotic relationship between efficiency and enjoyment to create a playful flow and interaction between elements. In this spare and lovely kitchen, food is grown, stored, cooked—and waste is composted to grow more food. And while he calls it Terrestrial Mechanics, it looks like it would be perfect for the future kitchens of Mars and other off-Earth settlements.
A Natural Refrigerator - Natural processes are at work too in Hester van Dijk’s Botijo fridge, based on a traditional Spanish jug of unglazed earthenware that cools its content by water evaporation. Research showed that the fridge maintains a temperature between 10 and 15 degree Celsius—a good temperature for vegetables. The cylinders are placed in the kitchen wall where they operate under natural conditions, without electricity.
You Are What You Eat... With - The Slow Food movement, as its name suggests, is a response to the hurried, thoughtless consumption of our frazzled times, and seeks to get people to relax and take time to enjoy their carefully-prepared, locally-grown food. Elise Rijnberg’s sleek and beautiful Piattona place settings, specially made with Slow Food and local production in mind, tell us to take time to enjoy the silverware too.
Water Everywhere - Free-running water in contact with minerals will regain its crystalline structure. This concept was the inspiration behind Nienke Vording’s Crystal Water glassware for revitalized water, using clear glass in a smooth, liquid-feeling design that seems to echo the water inside, and rhinestones in the pitcher as well as the stick water lolly.
A Little Cup of Home - Using local clay she dug up around the Netherlands, Lonnie van Rijswijck has created organic tableware which alludes to its patrimony by the subtle differences in color and shading, giving it all a one-of-a-kind quality.
From Crop to Cup - Another winner of the Sustainable Design Award, Wouter Haarsma’s Crop Coffee designs began with a simple idea, that coffee producers, who often live on as little as 50 cents a day, could be connected more directly with consumers by an internet-based retail structure, increasing producer revenues while bringing fresher coffee to the consumer. Along with this system are his homespun, evocative designs for storage, packaging, grinders and other accessories.
A Seat at the Table - Jeoren Wesselink dug deep into the hidden corners of heating systems to design the Flocomachine and system to reuse household expansion drums from central heating systems, just cutting them in two and putting them together again using human energy to create unusual new stools.
A Lamp this Bright and Beautiful is Truly Sinful, No? - No. Using ultra-efficient and low-heat LED lights, Sarah Jansen’s Cluster lighting sheds light on energy conservation while providing plenty of illumination for working, eating and reading: increasing or decreasing the size of the lamp modifies the brightness of the light output so you can brighten or dim without halogen lamps.
A Smoother Ride - Adam Roestenburg wants to revolutionize clean transportation, with a new bicycle design. Roestenburg’s design is a new type of bicycle/velocipede with an innovative pedaling system that is ergonomic so drivers can pump up the pedaling power, and it’s aerodynamic with less air resistance.
For more about Design Academy Eindhoven, read these features from the Trendease archives:
Responsible Design: Pumpin'em Out
Responsible Design: Peru
A New Label by the Design Academy Eindhoven
—Sparkle Hayter
