Author Archives: Nora González Dwyer

Eco Design, Good Design, materials, Product Design

The plastic bags battle

It is already 10 years since I first saw recycled and reusable bags in a supermarket. You buy them for a reasonable price (say, up to 0.50 €), you can use them for a long time and when they break you can exchange them for a new one with no additional cost. A good deal, I would say. But it is 10 years now and we still have an awful lot of plastic bags choking our environment.

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Picture from Arbel Egger

One of the reasons is that many shops still offer the “normal” one-use bags for free parallel to the recycled ones, so many people save the penny. Many of the customers that do care and buy the recycled bag regularly forget to bring it to the shop, and when they have a collection of 10 recycled bags at home they just don’t care anymore and take the ones that are for free.

Many shops don’t even have the alternative and provide only one-use bags. In fact, my experience shows that in small stores a little conflict takes place when I try to explain to the person behind the counter that I don’t need a bag.

Some people have been thinking about this and have taken action to fight the plastic bag problem:

Compostable plastic bags

You have probably heard about these already but they are now spreading fast in the market. Spain is the first plastic bag producer in Europe and it will forbid non biodegradable plastic bags by 2010, so the whole industry is rushing to adapt to the new situation.

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Aldi compostable bag. Picture from BASF

Aldi Süd, a German Supermarket offers now reusable compostable plastic bags. Alternative to these they offer recycled plastic bags, which cost a quarter of the compostable ones. Still, it is a start. Interesting about this bag in particular is the material it is composed of. “Ecovio” is a blend between a biopolymer made of corn starch and a polymer made petrol. The petrol polymer fraction has been processed so that it is in fact compostable. Petrol made biodegradable, not bad, uh?

Tassenbol

This is my favourite aproach so far to tacle the problem. I first saw it in a supermarket in Amsterdam and found it fabulous. It is just a bowl where customers put the bags they don’t need anymore and where they take them when they need some. Simple, effective.

tassenbol_bagglobesome fictitious examples of tassenbol possibilities. Picture from Tassenbol

The only real drawback I found is, that corporate image issues could interfere with the concept. Including a tassenbol in a shop implies promoting that customers leave the shop wearing any brand in their bags, including those of the competition. After researching a little bit I surprisingly found out that many supermarkets in the Netherlands have already the tassenbol in their subsidiaries, so they must have found enough advantages in it to compensate. Lets hope shops in the rest of the world join!

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Conference, Design Strategy, Eco Design, Good Design, Product Design, User Experience

DMY review: the conferences

This is the second part of my review of the DMY international design festival 2009 in Berlin. The first part took care of the expositions.

All conferences were planned on a symposium day and the whole event lasted about eight hours. The quality and background of the speakers was as motley as it gets. It started with two so called "institutional presentations" by the Taiwan design Center and the "Metropolitan Design Center of Buenos Aires". Promotional videos of both places, a lot of charts and never ending text on the projector. No real talk about design there, even though they repeated the word until it lost its meaning. I suppose they paid to be there…

Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki at the Symposium

Within the "Alternative strategies" block Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki talked about their "Cybernetic love: future sex project". These people analyze the Japanese society habits from all angles to get to the conclusion that sex practice is integrating elements such as virtual lives and places, electronic pleasure gadgets, robots, etc. till an extent, that a human partner is no longer the preferred alternative. This project is financed by Tenga, a company that develops high quality adult toys. I must say they have a point, check out their promotional video;  if this is not user experience design, I don’t what is!

Ronen Kadushin presented "Open Design" and his way for design to evolve if we really want good design to surround us. We all have seen how open source software gives the best results, now here is a way to do basically the same but with product design.

Ronen Kadushin at the Symposium

Interesting lectures of the block "Sustainability": Ralf Ketelhut from Stoffstromdesign let us know what really happens when products are waste and made us aware how harmful coatings and pigments are in our product. We also saw an example of a very nice nearly 100% environmentally friendly wallpaper. Key to success they said, is to go to the manufacturer, talk to him and find a different way of doing things.

from left to right: the wallpaper designer from eccellence goods, the roll of wallpaper, Ralf Ketelhut

Probably the best example of good innovative design was given by 2012 Architecten. They presented some realized projects in which they rather than recycling they reused material that was considered waste. They identify a source of large quantities of waste material in good conditions and they find a way to use it.

Jan Jongert from 2012 Architecten ans a shot of their Villa Welpeloo

One of their requirements when reusing materials is to take them as they are and add no processing to them when possible, this way it is economically and environmentally worthwhile reusing. Some of these projects are an espresso bar made with used PVC windows and the duchi shoe shop, where car windows make the shelves.

Jurgen Bey gave a nice lecture about how we approach design problems and what could be the role of design in the future. A pity that I didn’t record it… there is a good summary of it in design.nl

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Exposition, Good Design, Product Design

DMY review: the expositions

 This will be the first part of my review of the DMY intenational design festival 2009 in Berlin. The second part will take care of the conferences.

I must say I was in general rather dissapointed with the expositions. It is sad to find out that desing and styling are still so often confused even within the so called design comunity.

A lot of hand made furniture, loads of lamps, but very little of nice really creative design proposals. Since we all have enough expamples of boring/usesless design, I am going to focus on the things I liked.

Shelves:

Wooden shelf and Piegato metal shelf

A metal one from the Matthias Ries design office. When you order this shelf you receive it already precut and lacked, and you fold it yourself. I liked the fact that the more you load this shelf, the more stable it gets.

A wooden one from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg. To fix the books on this shelf you’d just pull up the loose plank and the tension created held the books. The system got unstable when the weigh of the books was too high, but it is a quite new approach.

Waschhaus presented their concept Colo, a dishwasher reduced to its very basics.

All you need to have in your kitchen is a second tap (for the water supply), a connection for the water waste and a power supply . The dishwasher itself consists of a transparent cover with the conventional washing mechanism inside. It fits into the sink and seals so that the water doesn’t come out. once the washing is finished the cover is pulled and it hangs somewhere up where it doesn’t disturb. It could be a good product now that apartments get smaller an kitchens even more. I particularly like the multisize-fitting tray.

 

dishwasher Colo

The Hochschule für Kunst und Design Halle had set up probably the nicest stand in the exposition and it had mostly very creative furniture in it. The best pieces were probably form the collection "7 für die ecke". Since I have no good fotos from it have al look at the designer’s website.

Last but not least a new lemon juicer form the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. It is always interesting to see how we find new solutions to hte verey basic design problems. This is a very aesthetical attempt that also plays with the gravity force. We didn’have the chance to see it working, though.

 Lemontile

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