Archive for the 'Design' Category

Here’s some food for thought as we go into the 3rd week of my look into packaging: What if packaging design was just a little more considered?

Could our sidewalks and road-sides be free of bottle caps and cigarette packs? Maybe our gutters wouldn’t be clogged with plastic bags and blister packs. Perhaps our oceans might have one less gigantic garbage patch.

I’m a fan of Clif Bar’s recent effort to keep litter in its place. The Litter Leash is a pretty clever little piece of design (it’s covered by two utility patents).

Its elegant design inspires me. It’s so simple, effective and “obvious,” yet unmatched. Now, it’s by no means perfect, but in essence, the litter leash takes a step to build a mental connection between litter and the environment and makes the user take responsibility for this tiny piece of trash.

Futureproofed might be a good word for it… What inspires you?

Patent 6,702,462
Patent 6,244,467

Popularity: 12% [?]

Graham & Brown is selling a wallpaper that you (or your kids) can draw on after all. I was imagining a corollary – what if you gave kids big soft LEGO-type blocks they could build their bedroom furnishings out of. They could be modular enough to create beds, tables, chairs, and more.

This wallpaper doesn’t actually encourage you to draw on the wall, but I would.

Artists Taylor and Wood, designed Frames. It’s a completely interactive wallpaper – you decide what you want it to be – whether you want to put up your youngsters art, paint directly in to a frame, or put up family photos – it’s up to you!

Link

Popularity: 12% [?]

Yup, that’s right. The fun, ‘how-to’ Instructables group is teaming up with magazine Popular Science and environmental blog Treehugger to host a contest encouraging folks to post instructions on how to do things greener. We here at Vestal are super excited to see what inventive stuff folks come up with. Most posts on Instructables already use affordable and recycled materials and show impressive resourcefulness, so it’ll be fun to see what people do when given this specific task. We’ll be sure to update y’all on the stuff we thought was neat. But hurry, you only have until Aug 19th to post!

Link to Contest

See Also: Solar Oven from Reflector, Plastic Bag Wallet, Make Your Own (Real) Diamonds

Popularity: 13% [?]

It’s the latest! The greatest! The new fad in the hip, techno culture! Flipr!

Or is it just a mockumentary of how branding on the web has been reduced to sensationalist copying? Well, that’s up for you to decide, but around here, we’ve been spending the past few weeks laughing about Flipr and everything it represents. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that it’s reached the same level for us as TPS reports.

Link to How to fake.. a Web 2.0 Logo

Popularity: 4% [?]

During a trip to China, I was shocked to find a Coke can with a ring pull tab (also known as a rimple). For those of you who are not familiar with the ring pull, it’s probably because they haven’t been very widely used for decades now. (They were phased out of use in the 80’s due to sharp edges and the tendency for the tabs to be casually tossed aside and become litter.)

In 1975, Dan Cudzik patented the ubiquitous “stay-tab” which offered a safer and more environmentally responsible solution which we now find on virtually every aluminum beverage can. The design is delightfully simple and keeps the tab attached to the can unless the user intentionally breaks the tab free.

So, when I found this can, I thought it was rather odd that the multi-national Coca-Cola corporation would use this arguably less responsible packaging solution in China. My guess is that this type of packaging is fractions of a cent cheaper to manufacture, providing financial savings to Coca-cola. However, given the undesirable traits of the ring pull, this would imply that the executives at Coca-cola make the conscious and deliberate decision to use an obsolete, dangerous and environmentally irresponsible packaging solution to increase profits at the expense of the public good. I find this juxtaposition of 44 year-old pull tab technology with modern boy-band, pop-icon graphics quite unfortunate.

Link to 1963 Ring-pull Patent
Link to 1975 Stay-tab Patent

Popularity: 14% [?]

Here’s a nice compilation of carbon (per-capita and total) emissions by state. It’s interesting to see some of the outliers – for example, South Dakota vs. North Dakota. One question in my mind is – do states with large cities have better per-capita scores because of public transportation and shared carbon costs (for example, heating in an apartment building), or would those be offset anyways by more industry? What is the greatest factor towards lowering carbon emissions, policy or land-use?

Scroll down to see the map. Link: http://www.eredux.com/states/

Popularity: 8% [?]

POM Wonderful, the pomegranate drink company, has come out with a new delicious line of products: POM Tea. In addition to being really yummy, it comes in a beautiful, slender glass, a deviation from their original eye-catching but awkwardly bulbous pomegranate glass design (on left).

An elegant alternative to drinking from clunkier mason jars (think “glass tomato sauce containers”), the Pom Reuse’s is more simliar to traditional glass design and will stick out less next to the other glasses in the cupboard. While the price is a bit steep, often as high as $3.50 a glass, I like to think I’m buying a set of nice glasses that just happens to come with a “prize” inside.

See Also: Reusable Toothbrush Case

Popularity: 9% [?]

We’ve been so busy the past few months (and by busy, I mean working hard this spring and then enjoying a vacation in June), that we’ve neglected to mention CleanScores.com

In the fall of last year, we were approached about designing a website which helped people learn about how clean, or dirty, their favorite restaurants are. We literally started out with a one-page sketch from CleanScores’ founders, and a gigantic database from the San Francisco Health Department. A few months later, CleanScores.com, which allows you to see a restaurant’s health inspection scores, was bringing a new level of transparency to the typically murky subject of government reports (see San Francisco’s Health Department website)

Along the way, we were given a lot of freedom by the founders to determine the website’s look and feel. This led to some innovative uses like Sparklines in the search results and another layer of content for expert users (try hovering over a restaurant’s current violations to see more in-depth explanations).

Additionally, we spent several months debating how to display a graph of a restaurant’s inspection scores. One of more challenging aspects of the site was to have a restaurant’s page look simple and uncluttered, but allowed an expert visitor to quickly discover all the information they could need.

Link to CleanScores.com (only serving San Francisco for the moment)

Popularity: 8% [?]

Construction began on a bright Peruvian summer day, after all the fog had lifted from the rooftops and the cars filled the streets. All my plastic panels sat neatly stacked in a corner as I broke out my lumber, my saw, and a measuring tape. My plan called for a large wooden frontispiece to anchor a metal frame forming the back three walls and the support for the roof. The large wood piece would contain shelves,the door jamb, and a large foldup garage door to serve as a makeshift patio. It was, undoubtedly, the most important piece of the home, the object that allowed everything else to work. Naturally, I almost messed it up.

I´m no carpenter, and I proved it almost immediately. The ferreterias, the hardware stores, lacked a bunch of brackets, screws, and bolts I guess I took for granted as being available at my local Home Depot or Lowe´s. This led to the first rule of amateur carpentry: half-inch nails cannot hold a building together, and even if they could, you don´t know how to do it. I pretended to believe I could nail a kind of plywood sheet to a 2×2 frame and it would all just, you know, work. It didn´t, as the whole structure almost tore itself apart the first time I got it upright. Back to the to the drawing board.

Amateur carpentry rule number two: you cannot cut straight if you cannot measure correctly. Nothing really matched in length because I was cutting by hand and my arm angle sent my saw in wild, inventive new directions. Thank goodness for shims.

Eventually, I got the darn thing to stand up and not try to kill me. A coat of black paint later, I moved on to the frame. The frame was a cinch; I didn´t have to cut anything, and a little duct tape worked to hold all the joints together in the corners. In order to form walls, I stapled my plastic panels onto wood slats running vertically then stapled extra thick plastic strips to one side of the slat, wrapped it over the metal pipe and stapled it to the opposite side of the wood. In this way, sort of like a shower curtain, I hung my walls. I used a similar strategy to attach the vertical metal poles to the wooden frontispiece. I repeated the process on the bottom of the plastic assembly in order to keep my walls from flapping.

I used simple hinges to attach my door, and some cheap wiring to put in some low-energy bulbs. I was ready to move in, not knowing how it would be to live on the roof in a plastic box.

Popularity: 11% [?]

On some basic level, everyone is an environmentalist; you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who honestly doesn’t want clean water, or clean air, or the occasional frolicking animal. I don´t really consider myself an environmentalist, not so much because I don´t believe in saving the planet but more from upbringing; where I grew up, ´environmentalist¨ replaced ´Communist´ as the pejorative of choice around 1992. So it came as a bit of a surprise that I ended up building my own green building out of recycled and recyclable products. I didn´t even use power tools.

Lima´s weather is some of the strangest in the world, not in its variety but in its unnerving consistency. Despite being on the ocean, it never rains, it never gets hotter than about 85 and never colder than the low 50s. It is an easy town to dress in, and even easier to design a home for.Because of the mildness, my house used plastic panels as walls – no need for insulation. If nothing else, I could rest assured that no spring showers would expose my poor engineering.

The panels took forever and a half to make by myself, each by hand. I used vegetable bags, the kind you get at the supermarket for your tomatoes, layered three deep in two by two sections. I used a piece of butcher paper to cover the sheet and then ran a regular clothes iron in circular sweeps over the paper. Though the iron is relatively cool, the plastic melts readily to itself. The resulting material is waterproof, and surprisingly tough,almost tarp-like. The more layers, incidentally, the tougher the material. Though this blog has discussed items being made in this way (such as wallets) I don´t think it´s common to make such large sheets of plastic and to use them as a building material.

In the end, I made around seventy 24 in x 18 in panels, using about 1200 bags in the process. I lost many afternoons behind my iron, but in the end I had my walls.

Popularity: 11% [?]