Design & Architecture

Photo credit: SIGG

SIGG is going stainless...steel, that is. The popular reusable-beverage-container maker has launched a range of stainless-steel products. Dubbed "Steelworks," the line of bottles, thermoses, commuter mugs, and flasks—133 in all—targets a younger, male audience with what the company describes as an "art-deco, industrial look."

Breaking with a century of tradition manufacturing its bottles in its Swiss factory, SIGG is outsourcing the production of its Steelworks designs to "select manufacturing partners in Asia." (We've got a hunch this means China.)

Fashion & Beauty

Photo credit: Rickshaw Bagworks

The marriage of form and function has yielded a generation of elegant, ergonomic, extraordinarily functional and economical products. Great design is no longer confined to high-end goods, as mass marketers such as Target have partnered with top designers to “democratize” great design. We are indeed in a golden age of product design.

Food & Health

Photo via: House of Sims
The average household has products for just about every condition or problem known to man or woman. A crème for pimples, a syrup for coughs, a capsule for headaches, a liquid for bugs. It has got to the point where folks need to buy a bigger home just to fit all this stuff in. Wouldn't it be nice if some of these products had multiple uses, thereby reducing the amount of packaging and waste necessary?

Well, thanks to a few curious folks who have considered the potential of various products having solutions for a variety of situations, we now know that many products are capable of uses beyond their scope of advertised description. I cannot vouch for every single one of these, I have tried enough of them to realize their potential is real. Here are 101 alternative uses for common, everyday products...

Food & Health

We love the idea behind Ning, a site which allows people to create their own social network for anything – from anime to baking, but including stuff of a more sustainable flavour such as local bartering and skillshare networks to permaculture meet-ups. We came across Ooooby – Out Of Our Own Backyards – a Ning social network dedicated to connecting for food growers and locavores, and working towards a “goal of food interdependence”. The site also features some hot pictures of chicken tractors (apparently also called “chicken burees”).

Science & Technology

Artist's impression of the 1.5 MW Dahan facility to be built near Beijing. News & image credits:Physics World

Construction is due to start next month on an experimental solar–thermal power plant located near China’s Great Wall (as pictured in artist's sketch above). The prototype is designed to supply power to 30,000 households by 2010. Built on the outskirts of Beijing, the 1.5 MW Dahan plant "will serve as a platform for experiments on different solar-power technologies."

Fashion & Beauty

Photo credit: Loyale

Flirty ruffles, crisp pleating, billowy puffed sleeves, and hemlines hiked up like the whoa dominate Loyale's spring 2009 line, which was inspired by trippy-hippy expressionist and counterculture artist Wallace Berman.

Berman's influence resonates through the bohemian yet thoroughly modern collection. (And the ruffled bikini drips with ultrafeminine and slightly inappropriate sex appeal.) In fact, the abstract floral Semina print is named for Berman's unbound, hand-pressed underground magazine, which encouraged the shedding of artistic inhibitions and set the stage for the West Coast surrealism movement.

TH Exclusives

Cardboard packaging. Image credit:DesignFederation,net

Much of the pulp used for paper-making comes from the century-old Kraft pulping process. Since early the 1930's, operations using it reclaim and burn the process' "black liquor" waste to produce a majority of the energy consumed. Big Paper has discovered a new Kraft process reclamation trick to make millions more each year: by perversely claiming tax credits offered under a "green" Federal fuel blending incentive.

Design & Architecture

Photo via Nashville Farmers' Market

The Berkeley Farmers’ Markets are just saying no to all plastic bags and packaging from their three weekly markets. Their “Zero Waste” campaign is trying to "remove, reduce, and recycle plastic and to recycle and compost all materialized at the markets."