Promotion: XL Extralight showcased its manufacturing process in an exhibition designed by Italian architect Andrea Caputo as an "immersive museum itinerary" during Milan design week.

Named Industream and put together by Caputo in collaboration with artist duo Invernomuto, the exhibition demonstrated the complex industrial process behind XL Extralight's footwear and foam design technology.

Although the company's core business is soles for footwear, it said its technology is leading it to other categories where lightness, durability and water-resistant properties are valued.

The Industream exhibition was held at the recently opened architecture and design centre Dropcity, founded by Caputo and occupying a previously abandoned network of warehouse tunnels behind Milan Central Station.

"At Fuorisalone 2024 we had the idea to create something completely different from previous editions," said XL Extralight foam design product and brand manager Carlo Vecchiola.

"This is why we have started a conversation with Andrea Caputo and his team to end up at Dropcity, the place to be for those who want to experiment and implement new design codes and visual experiences," he told Dezeen.

"For the first time since we have been exhibiting at the Milan design week way back in 2014, XL Extralight is unveiling its industrial process – from compounding to injection moulding – in an immersive museum itinerary."

XL Extralight, which was founded in the 1990s by Italian industrial group Finproject, designs polyolefin-based expanded and moulded foams that are super lightweight, soft and flexible while also being resistant to bacteria, UV rays, saline and chlorine.

Caputo and Invernomuto's Industream exhibition sought to emphasise the scientific aspects of the sole-making process, as well as the historic link between material innovation and human development.

At the exhibition, XL Extralight team members wore workwear-streetwear hybrid uniforms that were tailor-made by fashion house Lardini.

Recent brand collaborations by the brand include the modular Roku footwear from Camper, which features a removable sole that can be repaired and reused at the end of the shoe's life.

For more information about XL Extralight, contact Maria Elena Barbati and Bianca Maria Bertolissi at hello@barbatibertolissi.contact.

The photography is by Invernomuto for XL Extralight.

Milan design week took place from 15 to 21 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen for XL Extralight as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Sportswear brand Nike is developing its own generative AI model to design products using its vast bank of athlete data, Dezeen can reveal.

According to Nike's chief innovation officer John Hoke, the company is seeking to take advantage of its exclusive data on athlete performance with a bespoke large language model (LLM).

LLMs are a text-based form of artificial intelligence (AI) trained to recognise language patterns. The best-known example is OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Nike building AI "private garden"

"We use all the LLMs that are out there and we do have a model that we're building in-house," Hoke told Dezeen.

"It's a little bit of thinking about developing a private garden, of looking at our own datasets that are exclusive to Nike – so performance data from an athlete, from our laboratories, et cetera. And then kind of commingling that with some things from the public garden, but making sure that that's all contained within what we're training the model on."

The name of Nike's AI model is yet to be finalised.

Hoke spoke to Dezeen at a recent Nike event in Paris, where the brand unveiled its new collection of elite sports footwear ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games, which take place in the French capital this summer.

The company also showcased Athlete Imagined Revolution (AIR), a project that saw the design team create prototype shoes for 13 of Nike's top athletes – including US sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson and French footballer Kylian Mbappé – based on their requests and personalities.

Prompts based on the athletes' preferences were inputted into generative AI models to create hundreds of images that Nike designers then rapidly honed down into single concepts using other digital fabrication techniques including 3D sketching and printing.

"I would call this a new alchemy of making product at Nike," said Hoke.

"And that is taking the athletes' dreams, going deep into their personality, understanding what they're all about, adding that with our own imagination, our own intentions and those emerging technologies – AI and computational design – and kind of converging these together."

World Athletics regulations dictate that shoes used in competitions must be widely available, so it is not clear whether this hyper-personalised approach will ever make it to the track at tournaments.

"All the sports are governed by the proper regulations, and that governance is critically important to us," said Hoke. "We're not seeking an unfair advantage."

However, he hinted that Nike will continue to pursue the potential competitive benefits afforded by customised athlete products.

"It's an extension of who they are," he said. "I think that would give them both a physical advantage, but also a psychological and emotional advantage – that this is just an extension of my anatomy, it's my movement signature, it's my body being amplified with these products."

"I think what AIR represents is a step change in the way we design and manufacture."

Technology such as AI, virtual reality (VR) and 3D printing is an important part of this shift, according to Hoke, as it drastically expedites the prototyping process.

"There's this larger idea of quantum creativity of the future, which is being able to take in vast amounts of information, and use new technologies to do things very quickly," he said.

"So you sort of balance the velocity and the fidelity right here. And what usually takes weeks or months to show an athlete now takes hours. So they're really engaged because they're either seeing it in VR or we're sending them a 3D print, we're showing them on-screen."

AI is "rocket fuel for creativity"

Generative AI refers to AI models that create different types of content – such as text, images, video and code – by extrapolating from data they have been trained on.

Nike's investment may be seen as a vote of confidence in the technology after generative AI went through a process of extreme market excitement, followed by concern about implications for the creative industries and increasing scepticism from some experts in 2023.

"I don't think in our case of designers, it ever replaces creativity," said Hoke. "I think it is certainly rocket fuel for creativity. It certainly expands my own imagination to be able to do and see things in minutes and seconds versus weeks and months."

"And I've got to come to this equilibrium, where I think it's an amazing tool guided by a human's imagination," he added. "It's idle until you engage it."

Most of the doubts around the usefulness of generative AI revolve around models' tendency to make errors, known as hallucinations.

"For me, as a designer, I'm unafraid of that," said Hoke. "I think it's part of the magic of being able to stand back and discern what's coming at you."

"Errors and hallucinations don't scare me here. I think it's a different way of looking and it opens the aperture of my own creativity."

Other notable advocates of using generative AI in design are Zaha Hadid Architects principal Patrik Schumacher and Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky.

Meanwhile, Australian design practice Studio Snoop last year unveiled Tilly Talbot, a specialised LLM that it branded "the world's first AI designer".

All imagery is courtesy of Nike.

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Dutch designer Gijs Schalkx has retrofitted an old car to run on an unusual fuel source: waste plastic that is turned back into oil.

Schalkx's DIY project, titled The Plastic Car (Is Made of Metal), consists of an old red Volvo with a roof-mounted "de-refinery" that heats plastic to obtain oil for the fuel tank.

The project began as a follow-up to the Sloot Motor motorcycle that Schalkx made as part of his product design course at the ArtEZ University of the Arts, which runs on methane harvested from local bogs.

Schalkx, who is interested in DIY as a form of responsible design and living, wanted to build a car with a similarly original energy source and chose plastic because there was a ready supply to be found in his own household recycling.

He sourced an old car from a scrapyard in Germany, fixed it up to be road-legal and fitted his "de-refinery", which he says is quite similar to a "normal oil refinery", to the top.

Plastic is loaded into this reactor and burned in an oxygen-free environment to make it evaporate into gas. When the gas condenses again, it is in the form of oil, which then drips down through a tube into a fuel tank in the back of the car, ready for use.

Schalkx used only his own household recycling to power the car, which he drove for around half a year while making a video of the work, needing around one kilogram of plastic for every seven kilometres.

The de-refinery takes roughly one hour to produce 12 litres of oil. The designer calls the process "very inefficient", but that's part of the point.

Cars "will never be efficient" as a form of transport he says, and The Plastic Car is a way of "being honest" about that fact rather than covering it up.

"In comparison to an electric car, where you do not see the pollution because it's on the other side of the world, I tried to be very transparent, very honest," Schalkx said, referencing the outsized emissions involved in manufacturing an EV and its lithium-ion battery.

In fact, his ambition was to build a car "that looks really disgusting". As well as having the rickety-looking de-refinery strapped to its roof, the Plastic Car has an uneven paint job, wooden bumpers and Schalkx's website address scrawled on its side.

When it drives, it belches black smoke – not uncommon for an old diesel car but likely heightened by the plastic, even though the oil passes through three filters on the way to the engine.

Clear, undyed plastic produces a "nice, clear oil", Schalkx pointed out, while the oil from blue or black plastic is "really dirty".

"With old diesels, you can put whatever fuel you can find in there and they will run – so sunflower oil, used motor oil – and they did always smoke already," said Schalkx. "But if it drives on plastic, it is a bit worse."

Schalkx has had people get angry with him about his work – about the pollution, about the plastic being burnt rather than recycled. But he takes issue with current ideas about what constitutes "sustainable design", a term he sees being co-opted by companies to sell more products.

Instead, Schalkx focuses on repurposing what's already available and increasing reuse and repair by building up knowledge of how things work.

He also limited himself to using only his own household waste in the project and drove only as far as that would allow him – around 100 kilometres in a month. Compared to someone buying a new car and driving it, he says his environmental footprint was small.

"If you're a designer, you're making things, producing things, but we actually already have a surplus of things," said Schalkx. "So I don't think we can ever be really sustainable."

Another young designer who has aimed to keep old cars on the road is Australian student Alexander Burton, who invented a DIY electric car conversion kit that won a James Dyson Award.

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Electronics brand Bang & Olufsen has collected and restored several hundred units of its 1990s-era Beosound 9000 CD player, giving them a second life as a limited-edition product for fans of physical media.

Released under the name Beosystem 9000c, the offering pairs the classic CD player – instantly recognisable for its linear display of six CDs – with the brand's new Beolab 28 speakers.

Bang & Olufsen sourced 200 units of the CD player for the project, returning them to its factory in Struer, Denmark, where they were disassembled and inspected and had their components cleaned and repaired.

The factory is the same one where the machines were first created in 1996 and some of the technicians that worked on the restorations had also worked on the original products.

Bang & Olufsen gave the units a reimagined look, inverting the colours on the original design so that the CD display panel is deep black and the overlapping control bar is aluminium.

According to head of design Tiina Kierysch, this has the effect of enhancing the machine's "graphic edge" and helps the CDs to stand out even more as artworks.

"The result is timeless and showcases that even though the two products were designed in different decades, they become closely related through the application of colours, materials and finishes," said Kierysch.

Bang & Olufsen is positioning the release of the Beosystem 9000c as an example of how circularity can work within the electronics industry. The brand took a similar approach in 2020 with the Beogram 4000c turntable.

"With our Recreated Classics series, we are showcasing how Bang & Olufsen's unique capabilities within sound, design and craftsmanship are creating long-lasting, circular products," said head of product circularity and portfolio planning Mads Kogsgaard Hansen.

"We want to demonstrate that a second-life product can be just as attractive as a new product and that a high-quality item such as the Beosound 9000 doesn't need to have an end date."

Kogsgaard Hansen said the company also wanted to "celebrate" the revival of physical media that had been seen in recent years.

"Vinyls and CDs have returned to being something special, where people invest time and energy to connect with the music and artists they love," said Kogsgaard Hansen.

"Longevity in design and the passion for music listening are essentially what we are celebrating with the launch of Beosystem 9000c," he added. "It is all about keeping listening choices alive."

The Beosound 9000 CD player was designed for Bang & Olufsen by British industrial designer David Lewis, a frequent collaborator who passed away in 2011.

As well as its six-CD linear layout – apparently inspired by the window of a record store Lewis passed – the Beosound 9000 was known for some of its mechanical features, which Bang & Olufsen said were designed to "surprise and delight".

This included the "CD clamper" mechanism, which housed the laser to read the discs and could shift between them notably quickly. There was also an "auto-positioning" feature that always returned played CDs to face their original direction, so the text on their front faces would be readable.

As part of the re-release, each Beosound 9000 unit had to have its aluminium elements re-machined and re-anodised so that they would match the appearance of the new Beolab 28 speakers.

The system also showcases a number of different aluminium finishes, including hairline brushing, etching and pearl blasting.

Released in a limited edition of 200 at £45,000 a piece, each CD player has been individually tested and fine-tuned to meet Bang & Olufsen's contemporary specifications.

More often, it is classic turntables that become collectible pieces. A recent example is the Linn's Sondek LP12, which was rereleased with a design by Jony Ive and his studio LoveFrom.

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With Earth Day 2024 and an increasing number of environmental campaigners calling for an end to plastics, is time finally up for the 20th century's miracle material? Rima Sabina Aouf finds out if we can – and should – abolish plastic.

Earth Day 2024 has the theme of "Planet vs Plastics", campaigning for "the end" of the material starting with a 60 per cent reduction in plastic production by 2040 and ultimately building to a "plastic-free future".

"Better to incinerate plastic than recycle it"

The proposal is indicative of a broader escalation in the rhetoric around plastic.

In the face of mounting evidence of dangers to the health of people and planet, and with lobbying efforts ramping up as United Nations member states work towards a draft of a global plastics treaty by the end of this year, more abolitionist voices are emerging, and even clashing with campaigners for circularity.

Sian Sutherland, co-founder of advocacy group A Plastic Planet and alternative materials database PlasticFree, is among those who believe we should put an end to plastics – recycling and all.

"It is better to incinerate the plastic – safely – than it is to perpetuate its toxic existence by recycling it," Sutherland told Dezeen.

"We need to take plastic out of our system wherever possible. And if we burn it, despite the fact we are simply burning fossil fuels that were momentarily a bottle or plastic bag, we are taking it out of the system."

She points out that at the current rate, global plastic production is forecast to increase threefold by 2060, and that the reality is that little of it is recycled – around 5 per cent in the US and less than 10 per cent in the UK.

She also backs a recent report from the Center for Climate Integrity, which claimed that the plastics industry has spread disinformation about the efficacy of recycling as a sales tactic in the same way that oil companies have more famously obscured the climate impacts of fossil fuel.

"Recycling is the fig leaf of consumption," added Sutherland. "Makes us feel better but never actually fixes the problem. It simply prolongs it."

"We have mostly stopped material innovation"

Plastic-abolitionists like Sutherland argue that only binding phase-out commitments will channel investment into developing viable alternative materials.

"The answer to the 'is it possible' is this: for the last 50 years we have mostly stopped material innovation, because we had this miracle called plastic," said Sutherland. "It has become the default for almost everything – products, packaging, building materials, textiles."

Labelling plastic a "toxic, indestructible material", she adds that a ban would create "a vacuum that innovation will quickly fill with better, safer, nature-compatible materials".

"The odds are against all innovation whilst we still swallow the myth that recycling plastic is (a) happening and (b) the answer," said Sutherland.

Relevant technologies are beginning to emerge. Bio-based and biodegradable solutions made from crop waste, vegetables, mushroom mycelium, bacteria-forged cellulose and algae seek to emulate the light and pliable qualities that make plastic so integral to modern life.

Some designers are making do with what's already available. Richard Hutten, who at the 2019 Dezeen Day conference described plastic as "the cancer of our planet" and recycling as "bullshit", has managed to design almost entirely without plastic for years.

"Almost", because plastics – polymer-based materials usually derived from petroleum or natural gas – are so ubiquitous they're in products we don't even think about.

"The only plastic I've been using is paint on steel," Hutten told Dezeen. "It is almost impossible to avoid plastic completely."

In recent years he has made a barstool for British manufacturer Modus from cork and redesigned mid-century classics by Wim Rietveld with a mix of biodegradable latex and coconut hair in place of plastic foam.

"Plastic is not bad, it's just completely overused"

But for other environmental advocates, the idea of eliminating plastic misses the real problem: that most of the world today does not value the recovery of materials, of any type.

We may be able to replace every variety of plastic in time, but as long as we live with overconsumption and disposability we will continue to deplete the planet's resources, they argue.

"Plastic is not bad," Thomas Matthews partner and sustainability expert Sophie Thomas told Dezeen. "It's just completely overused, and we don't have the proper infrastructure to get it back in the system."

She points out that from its beginnings in the 1950s, plastic has been sold to consumers as a throw-away luxury that represented progress after the sacrifices of the second world war, when countries including the UK had strict salvage campaigns to collect household waste for reuse to make weaponry and counter slowdowns in imports.

"Every material had to be given back – bones, paper, string – everything had to go into the war effort," Thomas said. "So now this plastic comes along and it's like, don't worry about it. Use it once, throw it away."

"This is the kind of positive, clean, quick, cheap, colourful future that we wanted to bring in after the war."

Instead of changing those patterns of use, Thomas sees brands and manufacturers rushing to replace plastics in the name of sustainability, sometimes with alternatives that have a worse environmental impact.

One example is substituting plastic takeaway containers with paper, usually with a plastic lining that can't be separated, making both materials unrecyclable.

By contrast, PET and especially HDPE – two commonly used packaging plastics – are the easiest to recycle, when not fused to other materials.

"Complexity is the worst thing for recycling," said Thomas. "Monomaterial is the way we should go – bio-monomaterials especially."

Not all plastics are the same, and Thomas does advocate for banning some of them, such as PVC – widely used in construction – and polyurethane foam.

Both, she says, are difficult to recycle and full of "nasty" volatile organic compounds.

Design studio Layer recently developed the Mazzu Open mattress, which swaps out polyurethane foam for less toxic and more recyclable polyester-wrapped springs.

"Polyester is incredibly durable and has a long life – and it's this quality that makes it a useful material in design, as designing for longevity is one of the most powerful tools we have in terms of sustainability," Layer founder Benjamin Hubert told Dezeen.

"Foam has a much shorter lifespan before it loses its functionality, and – unlike polyester – is not recyclable. The trade-off for us here is really clear."

"All recycled plastic ends up as waste"

Much of the debate around abolishing plastics comes down to recycling.

While glass or aluminium can be recycled infinitely without degrading, the molecular structure of plastics gets weakened every time they go through the extrusion process until they can't feasibly be used any further. For single-use plastics, in particular, that means a very short lifespan.

For abolitionists, the compromised quality of recycled plastic makes it misleading to label the process "recycling" at all – hence Hutten's "bullshit" claim.

"In the most optimistic view, you could call recycling of plastic down-cycling," he said. "Eventually, all recycled plastic ends up as waste."

"It will never be a financially and materially viable solution," added Sutherland. "There is no economic model that makes sense – or to be honest Coca-Cola would have built the system years ago to recycle their 120 billion bottles every year."

Those who think there is still a place for plastic advocate for longer-life products within a system where collection and recycling can be guaranteed.

Recycled-plastic design brands such as Circuform and Smile Plastics call their furniture and sheet material circular as they can be recycled repeatedly – four times at a minimum, according to Circuform.

PearsonLloyd co-founder Luke Pearson, who focuses on circularity, agrees that plastic can be "mostly circular" if designed "intelligently".

By avoiding additives such as glass fibre, limiting colour, and adding a small amount of virgin plastic when needed for strength, existing material can be kept in the system for a very long time, he says.

As for chemical recycling – the expensive, hazardous and energy-intensive new technology that breaks down plastic to its basic building blocks so it can be remade with its original strength – Thomas believes it could one day serve as a final step to close the loop on plastic, after mechanical recycling options have been exhausted.

"We have to develop the infrastructure for plastic where you actually get that closed loop, otherwise you will have to go for a complete ban of the material," said Thomas.

"And then what? We'd have to plant huge amounts of trees if we're going to substitute with paper or any crop-based biomaterials."

"There really is no time"

Plastic-abolitionists and circularity advocates agree on a number of points: we need legal restrictions on single-use and toxic plastics, we need funding for biomaterials, and we need to change habits.

The upcoming UN plastics treaty provides an opportunity to realise these proposals. But while some sense momentum towards positive change, longtime plastic abstainer Hutten admits that he has lost some of his optimism.

Recently, he created his first plastic piece in years: a one-off cupboard called Atlas, named after the Titan in Greek mythology who carried the world on his shoulders.

In his "reversed Atlas", a comment on the futility of design in tackling the pollution crisis, the Earth is depicted as collapsing under the weight of humankind.

Sutherland, meanwhile, is in high gear trying to get provisions such as cuts to production volumes of plastics, bans on single-use items and mandated chemical testing into the UN treaty.

"We need to leapfrog the 'less bad' to 'regeneratively good' in all materials and systems now," said Sutherland. "There really is no time for any other approach."

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Dutch beer brand Heineken and US clothing company Bodega have launched The Boring Phone at Milan design week, a "dumb" phone designed to prevent young adults from scrolling on smartphones.

Produced by Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Human Mobile Devices (HMD), which manufactures Nokia phones, The Boring Phone has been stripped of the "distractions" seen in today's smartphones and is used primarily for phone calls and text messages.

Most notable feature is the absence of internet access and social media, which was intended to encourage young adults to "disconnect with their tech" and have social interactions in person rather than scrolling on smartphones.

Reminiscent of the mobile phone technology available in the early 2000s, the flip phone has a transparent casing that users can cover in holographic stickers and a monochromatic sub-screen displaying two Heineken beer bottles.

Its design was informed by Newtro culture, retro aesthetics interpreted in a modern context, aiming to appeal to a Gen Z and Millennial audience.

In keeping with its old-school design, the phone has a long battery life of a week in standby time. It also has a 0.3-megapixel camera, FM radio and a snake game.

"Smartphones can be too interesting, so we wanted to design a boring one," said Bodega co-founder Oliver Mak.

"We were really inspired by the rise of Newtro and wanted to reinterpret a past cultural icon that some younger Zillennials may not have experienced before."

By limiting the phone's technology, Heineken and Bodega hope young adults will be encouraged to make more meaningful social connections without being distracted by the pull of social media.

"With smartphones becoming so advanced and interesting to the user, it's easier than ever to connect to the online world but harder to stay in the moment," said the brands.

"With modern-day frills removed, the phone is unable to download social media or other apps that take away from being present."

The Boring Phone concept resulted from research commissioned by Heineken on smartphone use among Gen Z and Millennials in the UK and US.

According to the brand, 90 per cent of those in the study admitted to "doom scrolling" in social scenarios and checked their phones an average of seven times on a night out.

Heineken claims that attitudes towards mobile phone use are changing. Its research found that 37 per cent of Gen Z and Millennials claim they think they check their phones too often in social situations, and 32 per cent said they would prefer to be able to "switch off" from their phones on nights out.

While HMD has produced just 5,000 Boring Phones, none of which are available for purchase, an app will be launched in June that will turn smartphones "boring" to help people disconnect from their technology.

Also informed by phone of the past, US start-up Clicks Technology recently unveiled a keyboard attachment for iPhones, which features raised buttons reminiscent of Blackberry phones in the early 2000s.

In other mobile phone news, Nokia partnered with repair specialists iFixit to create a smartphone with a DIY repair kit, aiming to make it easier for people to fix their phones themselves.

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Japanese design studio Sozai Center has created Adam Sheet, a washable and scratch-resistant biomaterial made of leftover apple pomace mixed with bioplastic.

Studio founder Shotaro Oshima and his team created the earthy-hued biotextile using apple pomace salvaged from Japan's Aomori Prefecture – one of the country's leading apple production areas.

Adam Sheet is a translucent speckled material made of "every part" of the pomace, including the flesh, skin, seeds and stem.

Sozai Center ground the pomace into a fine powder, which is first adjusted to the correct moisture and sugar content, according to Oshima.

After this, the pomace powder was combined with a small amount of bio-based polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to bind the finished sheet together.

"Almost 87 per cent of the sheet is made out of pure apple pomace," said Oshima, who told Dezeen that the material does not contain any fossil-derived plastic.

The designer likened the seasonal production process to making wine and explained how the colour of the material "varies from year to year, depending on the moisture and sugar content of the batch of apples".

"The colour of the sheets reflects these changes," he added.

Playfully named after Adam's apples, Adam Sheet was designed in response to the large volume of apple waste created in Aomori Prefecture each year – something that Oshima said has become a "big issue".

The waterproof material is machine-washable and scratch-resistant, according to Oshima.

However, being made from a mix of food waste and bioplastic will likely make Apple Sheet difficult – if not impossible – to recycle.

So far, Adam Sheet has been turned into bank and travel card cases as well as small crossbody pouches.

Oshima said that Sozai Center is currently testing the boundaries of the material and has plans to transform it into fashion, furniture and interior design.

"Adam Sheet can be sewn, easily cut and transmits light – characteristics applied to fashion," explained the designer.

Elsewhere, Australian studio Great Wrap has used potato waste to create a compostable bioplastic alternative to clingfilm while design studio Tomorrow Machine produced GoneShells, a biodegradable juice bottle made from potato starch that can be peeled away like fruit skin.

The photography is courtesy of Sozai Center.

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Sportswear brand Nike has unveiled its new collection of elite footwear ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games this summer, claiming that AI is sparking a "super cycle" of innovation.

The company has developed its Nike Air cushioning technology in four new designs as part of a collection called the Blueprint Pack.

Included are the Nike GT Hustle 3 basketball shoe, the 2024 Nike Mercurial football boot and the Nike Victory 2 and Nike Maxfly 2 spikes for sprinting and middle-distance track-running.

Nike chief design officer Martin Lotti said increased energy return – or bounce – provided by the improved Nike Air will be "the difference-maker" at this year's Olympic and Paralympic Games hosted in Paris in July and August.

"The Olympics represents the biggest platform for sports – the athletes have been training all their lives to get ready for this," he told Dezeen. "Being in the sports industry, designing sports equipment for footwear and apparel, it's also our pinnacle moment."

"It's an amazing test for us every single time, to not only do new products, but new and better products, and that allows us to have an incredible platform to innovate and design and literally put our best foot forward."

Competition between brands to develop increasingly high-performance footwear for major sporting events has been intensifying in recent years – notably in marathon running with the so-called "super-shoe wars", where shoe development has roughly coincided with record-breaking run times.

The past decade has seen Nike focus primarily on lightweight foams and springboard-style carbon-fibre plates, but with the latest releases, it has turned to optimising its Air technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and improved digital modelling have enabled "a new super cycle of Air innovation that is driving better, faster, more efficient solutions" the brand said, as researchers can test more ways to apply the system than was previously possible.

Combined with Nike's vast bank of data taken from recording athletes in its research lab, that makes it possible to simulate how a footwear design will perform, react to load and weigh without the need to make a physical prototype, the brand explained.

While Nike has not disclosed any updates to its record-breaking marathon shoe the Alphafly 3 to mark the Paris games, it said advances in Nike Air are allowing the system to be applied to other specialist sport shoes in new ways.

For instance, it said its running spikes now have a flatter ground-facing profile to provide athletes with greater stability, while a double-layer of Nike Air Zoom in the Nike GT Hustle 3 affords better energy return to basketball players.

An ultra-thin four-millimetre Air Zoom layer in the 2024 Nike Mercurial, tweaked from the previous 2022 version, makes it easier for footballers to stop and accelerate on soft ground, according to the brand.

Nike Air – a pressurised air pocket embedded within the sole of shoes – was first used in the midsole of the Nike Tailwind running shoe in 1978 and has since featured across the manufacturer's entire footwear range.

The Blueprint Pack, which will be released to the public in July, features 13 shoes in total identified by a white, orange and blue colour scheme that Nike said was inspired by drawings in the sketchbooks of company co-founder Bill Bowerman.

Nike launched the products at an exhibition held in Paris's Palais Brongniart, where it erected giant statues of its sponsored athletes in front of the neoclassical building.

Also debuted were two new iterations of its Pegasus series of extra-cushioned running shoes.

One was the Nike Pegasus Premium, which Nike said uses its first "sculpted, visible Air Zoom unit", developed with the above-mentioned AI technology, to deliver more energy return than previous versions.

It also launched the Nike Pegasus 41, featuring an improved ReactX foam midsole compared with its predecessor that the brand said increases energy return while reducing the shoe's carbon footprint.

The two consumer-oriented shoes will be released in spring 2025 and June 2024 respectively. Among Nike's recent shoe releases is the Air Max Dn.

The photography is courtesy of Nike.

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Designer Joe Doucet has revealed his Airiva turbine – a modular wind power system that was conceived to have the necessary visual appeal to fit into urban settings.

Currently a prototype, the Airiva energy system features two-metre-tall vertical blades with a sculptural helix shape rather than the propeller style commonly seen on large wind farm turbines.

These blades create a mesmerising flowing movement as they spin, which is key to the design according to Doucet, as it helps these systems to be seen as a desirable addition to buildings, campuses or roadsides.

"The elevated design plays a meaningful role in adoption and integrates within the architecture and infrastructure of our urban and suburban landscapes to bring clean energy closer to where we live and work," said Doucet.

Airiva is a form of distributed energy generation, which refers to the kind of energy production that happens on rooftops, gardens or other small sites for use by the property's owner or others in the surrounding area.

Proponents of distributed energy infrastructure argue that there is less power loss when energy is used locally and that these systems give their users resiliency against grid outages.

To make Airiva adaptable to many urban scenarios, the system is modular and scalable with four blades enclosed in square "wall segments" that can be joined together to make a unit of basically endless length.

"The Airiva wind energy system complements and co-exists with other renewable energy systems while expanding the applications for distributed wind energy," Doucet told Dezeen.

Doucet first designed a version of the Airiva concept in 2021 after researching distributed energy products for a project and finding there weren't many made with attention to aesthetics.

Then called the Wind Turbine Wall, the concept design received enough attention online that Doucet was driven to launch Airiva in partnership with tech industry veteran Jeff Stone.

The current version of the design is the result of two years of engineering, development and testing, with the key change being to the shape and size of the blades.

Their helical shape emerged as the most high-performing after 16 blade concepts were evaluated and three versions tested at wind tunnel facilities.

The turbines are not designed to be as powerful as the large industrial variety, with Airiva estimating that each wall segment of four turbines can provide 1,100 kilowatt-hours in annual energy production (AEP) based on initial testing.

To meet the total energy demands of the average US home, it would take a system with ten segments or 40 turbines.

However, Airiva was designed to supplement rather than replace other energy sources such as grid electricity, and the company expects its systems to significantly contribute to meeting the energy demands of urban buildings.

In particular, the company plans to target the commercial market and has identified commercial buildings and campuses, municipal and public facilities, airports, road and rail infrastructure networks, and harbours and coastal areas as good potential sites for its units.

The Airiva segments are made of aluminium with injection moulded plastic for the blades. The company has a target of using 80 per cent recycled materials once it begins to manufacture.

Airiva will test a full-scale prototype of its unit later this year, which will consist of two wall segments with four turbines each, plus an "end hub" to house the controls, communications and power management.

The company plans to conduct customer pilots in the second half of 2024, with the aim of taking the first orders in 2025.

Other projects aimed at squeezing turbines into dense urban contexts include the wind-powered Papilio street lamp and the multi-directional O-Wind turbine, which won the 2018 James Dyson Award.

Doucet is a New York-based designer whose practice focuses on innovation and sustainability. Another one of his ventures is Othr, a brand for 3D-printed homewares.

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Artificial intelligence and a "gorpcore" aesthetic combine in Terra – a "compass" created by design studios Modem Works and Panter & Tourron to enable people to go on walks without their phone.

Terra is a pocket-sized gadget that guides its user along a route using haptic feedback and a subtle arrow interface like a compass needle.

The routes are bespoke and created by AI in response to the user's prompts. "Two-hour Marais stroll with patisserie visit" and "Kyoto architecture tour, back by 4pm" are two examples from the Terra website.

Modem Works and Panter & Tourron created Terra for people who want to go for walks and either not take their phone or at least not have to look at it. Panter & Tourron founder Stefano Panterotto described it as a "non-device" that "lets you wander without the distractions of your phone".

"In a world overwhelmed by the constant distractions of our smartphones, the need for a mindful connection with our surroundings has never been more pressing," he said.

Open-source and manufacturable by 3D printing, Terra eschews the norms of electronic products in some ways. Its physical form is small but rugged-looking, designed with reference to New Age objects and "gorpcore" – the trend of wearing outdoor recreation gear as a style statement.

"In our physical design, we aimed to adopt a radical approach within the tech world," Panterotto told Dezeen. "Moving away from the classic sleek and polished aesthetic, we embraced the great outdoors and the broader gorpcore aesthetic, as well as the visual language of New Age culture."

He gave the example of worry stones as a kind of stress-reducing and anti-anxiety object that served as a reference for Terra.

"This marks a departure from the familiar look and feel we've become accustomed to with companies like Apple," said Panterotto. "Our goal was a design that is both functional and meditative, similar to a fidget device – a product you can hold and play with for relaxation."

The screen is softened by appearing beneath the surface of Terra's outer shell, and the interface itself is designed to be minimal and unobtrusive, with the arrow only appearing when requested and gentle vibrations indicating if the user is headed in the wrong direction.

The interface also features a series of animal and plant symbols, which are displayed to indicate that a person is on the right track.

"To a large extent, the digital interface was inspired by fictional devices like the one from Jumanji, where symbols and imagery materialise in a manner that blurs the lines between the magical and the technological," said Modem Works co-founder Astin le Clercq.

Terra's open-source software combines the application programming interfaces (APIs) of Google's Places and AI chatbot ChatGPT to translate the user's location, intentions and available time into a trail of GPS coordinates.

The user runs the software locally on their computer or phone to input text prompts and generate their route.

The software is available for free on the open-source platform GitHub, along with CAD files for the outer shell of the device so it can be 3D printed. There is also a list of eight electrical components the maker needs to acquire, including an LCD display module, GPS module, haptic controller and power button.

Astin said that he was inspired to make Terra an open-source project by the "DIY spirit" of the Whole Earth Catalog and the work of Italian designer Enzo Mari, who invented the concept of "autoprogettazione" or self-design in 1974.

"By making Terra open-source, we invite everyone to explore new ways to enhance their mood and physical wellbeing in the age of machine intelligence," said Astin.

Modem Works and Panter & Tourron intend to collaborate with brands to put versions of Terra into production in the future but say the original designs will always remain free and open-source.

Both studios work at the intersection of design, technology and innovation. A previous project from Panter & Tourron saw the studio work with Space10 to create a lightweight, foldable couch with the help of AI.

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London design practice EcoLogicStudio has created a collection of everyday objects using algae, including a desktop air purifier that outputs material used to create furniture and accessories, to be shown at Milan Design Week.

The PhotoSynthetica collection is anchored by the AIReactor, a desktop "photobioreactor" that uses algae to purify the air. The biowaste from the process is then used to create biopolymers integrated into 3D-printed objects, such as the stool and ring that complete the collection.

The collection grows upon the research project EcoLogicStudio's PhotoSynthetica launched in 2018, which includes a massive tree sculpture created using biomass, or waste material, harvested from microalgae.

"There are several motives behind the creation of this collection," the studio told Dezeen."First and foremost to support the scaling up of the PhotoSynthetica technology, thus allowing its deployment in urban areas with high levels of air pollution, offering immediate benefits to densely populated areas where air quality is a significant concern."

"By harnessing the natural air-purifying properties of algae, the technology effectively removes pollutants such as carbon dioxide and particulate matter from the atmosphere, thereby reducing air pollution levels."

The AIRreactor, standing at 3 feet (1 metre) tall, was created using a birch plywood frame that can be recycled or composted, according to the team. It supports a glass "photobioreactor" at its centre, which contains 10 litres of a bright green liquid containing micro-algae cultures.

Air is introduced to the liquid by a "reactor" at the bottom, which constantly stirs the mixture to emulate natural marine waves and currents.

The algae then filter carbon dioxide and pollutants from the air and convert it into biomass and oxygen through photosynthesis, the waste of which was collected to create the accompanying stool and ring.

"In addition to capturing pollutants, the microalgae cultivated in AIReactor can be harvested and utilized to produce biopolymers for 3D printing products," said the studio.

"After harvesting, the algae biomass can be dried and then undergo further processing to produce biopolymers, which are natural polymers derived from renewable plant-based sources."

The stool, which features a ribbed, amorphous body, was created in collaboration with the Synthetic Landscape Lab at Innsbruck University, and is composed of up to 30 per cent of the biopolymer created from the AIRreactor, according to the studio.

A PLA/PHB compostable polymer was used for the remaining material composition.

Its material makeup allows the objects to be flexible and "creates the possibility for near infinite customisation of the product".

The Bio-digital ring is similarly made up of 30 per cent of algal biomass, with a base of polylactic acid. It is composed of layers of 3D-printed polymers to create a topographical, bumpy mass.

"In the uniqueness of this object we can recognize one of the most significant aspects of contemporary technological evolution: its inevitable convergence with the world of living nature," said EcoLogicStudio founder Claudia Pasquero.

All three objects were created to illustrate the circularity possible when using biobased objects and materials, as well as to introduce a "mass customization" of design technology into everyday objects.

"We want to accelerate the mass customization of the design technology to suit different environments, including residential areas, commercial districts, industrial zones, and public spaces" said the studio.

"Catering to diverse needs and requirements, thus introducing circular economies of biomaterials."

EcoLogicStudio also used algae to purify air inside an enclosed playground and created a DIY algae growing kit during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The PhotoSynthetica collection is set to debut at Milan Design Week, along with a bright orange, sculptural toilet by designer Samuel Ross for Kohler.

The images are by Pepe Fotografia

The PhotoSynthetica collection will be on view from 15 to 21 April as part of Isola Design Festival 2024 during Milan Design Week. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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British design studio Seymourpowell has put cheap electronic goods under the spotlight with Un-Made, a project imagining four possible ways to design for quick disassembly and recycling.

As part of the project, Seymourpowell devised four automated disassembly mechanism concepts using an electric toothbrush as an example for their animated graphics.

Each of the mechanisms could be built into a product during manufacturing and then activated in a factory at the end of the item's life.

The first Un-Made concept is a pin mechanism. Similar to the action of opening a SIM card slot on a smartphone, it involves poking a pin into a small, sealed pinhole on the rear of the product to release the internal components.

The second concept is a vacuum mechanism. It involves placing the product into a vacuum, causing closed cell foams and air-sealed features within it to expand and bust the external housing open.

Third, there is a piston mechanism that works by pushing a piston through a cap on the bottom of a device and forcing all of the internal components upwards until they emerge through the top.

The final concept involves using UV glue – a type of adhesive that deactivates under ultraviolet light. In this concept, the product is placed into a specially lit chamber to release the clamshell construction.

The Un-Made project was led by Eddie Hamilton, a senior industrial designer at Seymourpowell, who was driven to make the work after researching what electric toothbrush to buy for himself.

"Inevitably I went for the cheap one, at which point Amazon smugly pointed out they'd sold 10k+ of that model last month alone," said Hamilton.

"As an industrial designer, I spend time obsessing over the product I'm working on, typically thinking of it in isolation," he added.

"But one thing I occasionally fail to remember or adequately picture is the true scale of that product once manufactured. 10,000 units sold per month seems vast."

Using Amazon's bestsellers list, Hamilton ascertained that fabric shavers, steam irons, wireless doorbells, wireless computer mice, digital tyre inflators and USB-C adaptors were all items selling in their thousands each month, at a price of less than £20.

While designing products so they can be repaired is important, the associated expense may not be something that customers can justify for small items sold at this price point, Hamilton said.

"Even if we change societal attitudes, the bottom line is whether you should open that cheap toothbrush to replace a failing battery when you only paid £24.99 for it two years ago," he said.

"I'm optimistic for some product categories to get the ball rolling, namely expensive and bulky items. But I'm also a realist that we need alternative strategies adjacent to repair. This is where we must design for disassembly."

In Hamilton's view, disassembly and recycling is a worthy "next best option" to repair for cheaper objects, as it keeps the materials in a circular material flow.

The Un-Made design team took inspiration from Agency of Design's Design Out Waste project, which looked at three strategies for keeping a toaster out of landfill. But they particularly wanted to explore just how efficient the disassembly process could be made through automation.

The cheaper and easier the process, they say, the more motivation there is for companies to pursue this approach and recover the components and materials inside their devices.

"A huge part of the reason e-waste ends up in landfill is because of product complexity and the inherent challenges involved in their disassembly," Seymourpowell lead designer Alex Pearce told Dezeen.

"To date, because e-waste has been considered too time-consuming and costly to disassemble – there has been no (commercial) incentive strong enough to make it a viable option."

The materials inside even cheap devices are valuable, Pearce points out, particularly when there are supply shortages or when it comes to rare-earth minerals.

"When you consider that more gold exists within a ton of e-waste than within a ton of gold ore dug from the ground, a straightforward economic imperative becomes clear for companies who are able to recover and reuse these materials," said Pearce.

Seymourpowell imagines disassembly taking place either at the manufacturer's facilities following a take-back procedure, or potentially at a public recycling centre if disassembly processes have been sufficiently standardised.

The London-based studio is known for its innovative product and transport designs, as well as concepts that challenge current norms. Recent projects from the studio have included the two-in-one reusable Bottlecup and a spaceship cabin for Virgin Galactic.

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Users speak softly into their hand to give AI voice commands using the Wizpr smart ring, a wearable designed by Korean technology company VTouch.

The Wizpr ring proposes a new way of interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual assistants – by bringing a hand to the lips and unobtrusively speaking into it.

There is no need to push a button or use wake words, as the device is activated by a proximity sensor that detects when the ring is close to the user's mouth.

According to VTouch, this recognition is immediate and terminated when the hand moves away, with none of the delay associated with wake words. The device will filter out background noise so the user doesn't need to raise their voice and can even whisper.

The ring is designed to be used in conjunction with the user's choice of earphones so that they can hear the responses from their AI assistants.

VTouch – which made its name with non-contact touchscreens during the Covid era – is positioning the Wizpr ring as a quiet technology in a noisy world and as the future of AI interaction.

"AI-based conversational computing is expected to be the next big thing that goes beyond the limitations of graphical user interfaces such as PCs and smartphones," said VTouch founder and co-CEO SJ Kim.

"With Wizpr, we aim to realise a conversational computing environment where you can interact with AI by talking to it with your voice anytime, anywhere, without having to look at a screen."

Kim told Dezeen that he agreed with predictions that 2024 would be the year of the smart ring, which began circulating after Samsung unveiled its Galaxy ring at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, with Apple also rumoured to have a product in development.

"Among wearable devices, we believe that wearable glasses will not be popularised in the near future because they are difficult to use in daily life due to visual interference and difficult to improve wearability due to weight," said Kim.

"Earphones, on the other hand, have been popularised to the point where it is common to see people wearing them in their daily lives due to their wirelessness and ability to hear outside sounds," he continued.

"Rings are also popularly worn as accessories because they are comfortable to wear on a daily basis, so we believe that smart rings can be popularised as well."

He believes Wizpr would have an advantage over other smart rings like the Galaxy and Oura due to its focus on advanced AI rather than fitness and health.

VTouch imagines the ring being used to have contextual conversations with AI based on the user's calendar events, messages, emails, location and weather. It also imagines it will be used to send and listen to messages and control smart home devices.

"People's expectations of AI have risen to the level of ChatGPT and Gemini," said Kim.

"If you combine one, a conversational AI like ChatGPT; two, the already popular wearable wireless earphones; and three, the Wizpr ring, a wearable voice input device, you can realise conversational computing where you can talk to AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini anytime, anywhere."

"We are confident that this will be the real meeting of smartphones and AI," he added.

The Wizpr ring is made of titanium and epoxy resin and will be available in a black or silver finish. Its four-gram frame houses a battery, CPU, microphone, proximity sensor, Bluetooth, low-energy chip and antenna.

The ring also has a single button, which the user presses to switch between different AI assistants. They can also press the button five times to activate an emergency SOS function.

The Wizpr smart ring was previewed at CES earlier this year, where it was an honouree in the 2024 Innovation Awards. It is now in the final prototype stage and will go into production in June.

Other products that made waves at the trade show this year include a Game Boy-looking AI assistant by Teenage Engineering that aims to wean users off their smartphones.

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Japanese manufacturer Sumitomo Metal Mining Co has showcased its heat-producing Solament material in a jacket displayed at the annual SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

Sumitomo Metal Mining Co collaborated with consultant Droga5 Tokyo and fashion designer Kosuke Tsumura to create the jacket as a way of demonstrate the innovative material's potential.

Named the Down-Less Down Jacket, the coat has a typical puffer jacket silhouette, but is hollow between the transparent layers of material where the feathers of a traditional down jacket would be contained.

Instead of using feathers or a synthetic material for warmth, the jacket's Solament material utilises a particle developed by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co called CWO to absorb near-infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye.

The material converts the near-infrared light it into heat, warming the body "instantly".

"The apparel industry is known for having one of the highest environmental footprints," said Tsumura. "Solament is a fascinating, futuristic material harnessing solar energy."

"It grants excellent warmth, enabling effects comparable to down jackets without using actual down," he continued.

Beyond the heating potential, the company said that the material can also be used to block heat. It believes the material could have multiple applications – for example on automobile windows.

SMM said that experiments using the material for glass and vinyl have shown five to 10 Celsius drops in indoor temperatures.

According to the firm, it is working with Tsumura to develop a sun hat that would test the heat-shading capabilities in terms of apparel. The company also said the material could have applications relating to privacy.

"The worries associated with infrared-based illicit activities from cameras, seeing through swimwear, will become a thing of the past," said SMM.

"Athletes, for example, will be able to focus on giving their all without any privacy concerns."

The Down-Less Down Jacket was shown at the Creative Industries Expo at SXSW in Austin, Texas in early March. Other technologies revealed at SXSW included a suite of developments by 3D construction company ICON, including a crane-mounted 3D printed that can print multi-storey structures as well as a low-carbon 3D printing mixture.

Recently, MIT developed a "4D-knit dress" using heat to shape 3D-printed textiles.

The photography is courtesy of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co.

SXSW 2024 took place from 8 to 16 March in various locations around Austin. For more events, talks and exhibitions in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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Design research agency FranklinTill has compiled a list of principles to help designers, makers and brands avoid greenwashing when sourcing textiles.

By making it easier to identify textiles that have a greater positive impact on people and planet, FranklinTill hopes to enable a shift towards regenerative materials.

"We can only move towards a regenerative approach to textiles by understanding the full lifecycle of our materials," said co-founder FranklinTill Caroline Till.

"As designers, makers, brands and manufacturers, we need to think of materials not as static and linear, but as dynamic, evolving systems, to holistically consider the full impact to the wider ecosystem they are a part of."

The defining characteristic of regenerative materials, according to Till, is that they restore and nourish the ecosystems they are part of.

"Sustainability, by its very definition, is all about maintaining the status quo, while regeneration seeks to actively heal and put back better," she said.

FranklinTill first unveiled its nine principles of regenerative design in an exhibition at the Heimtextil trade fair in Frankfurt in January, with a second show planned for the Techtextil fair in April.

In an online exclusive, we are also unveiling them here. Read on to see all nine, with captions written by FranklinTill and examples of material innovation in practice:

Enriching Communities

"To go beyond sustainability and become regenerative, we must focus on both the social and the environmental impact of production."

"This means spotlighting how materials are made and by whom, looking to improve livelihoods with better pay, working conditions and future prospects."

Replenishing the Land

"Focused on high yields with an over-reliance on pesticides and water, modern industrial farming damages land."

"Regenerative farming works holistically to reverse this, rebuilding organic soil matter and sequestering carbon in soil, wetlands and trees, retaining water and reducing the use of artificial pesticides and fertilisers."

Preserving Heritage

"Many indigenous practices are regenerative by nature, working with the land and local communities."

"By acknowledging and celebrating the value of cultural heritage and craftsmanship and learning from its ecological wisdom, we can protect valuable skills and knowledge from being lost to technology and globalisation."

Restoring Biodiversity

"Regenerative practices must take a multispecies approach to encouraging biodiversity."

"Acknowledging the threat of extinction, addressing the causes of loss, and reviving habitats for diverse plants and wildlife aids ecological restoration."

Biological Fabrication

"The convergence of science and design offers huge potential for new materials, from living microbial systems to synthesising nature’s regenerative powers."

"Growing and extracting next-generation materials using innovative, highly productive processes can create plentiful resources from minimal input."

Naturally Abundant

"Highly productive, resilient raw materials that grow with little human intervention offer naturally high yields, strengthen soils and capture carbon."

"These abundant, versatile crops could help move the focus away from traditional natural material fibres that require high levels of water, pesticides or fertilisers."

Reclaiming Material

"Extracting raw materials, making products, then discarding them and their byproducts is contributing to the global waste problem."

"By putting useful waste streams back into production, we can better utilise existing resources and avoid waste altogether."

Radical Transparency

"By using science and technology to create tools and processes that capture and record data along supply chains, we can understand the social and environmental impact of the materials we consume."

"Encrypting materials helps brands track their footprints and life cycles, and communicate this information to customers in a meaningful, trustworthy and accessible way."

Cultivating Localism

"By supporting the local sourcing, production and consumption of materials, we can avoid globalised transportation and reduce carbon footprints."

"Focusing on availability, seasonality and resourcefulness means embracing non-standardisation, often improving local environments as well as extracting from them."

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Hundreds of pieces by UK designer Max Lamb and pieces made with cord-covered waste material by South Korean designer Jay Sae Jung Oh are being displayed at New York gallery Salon 94 Design.

Both designers showed works across two separate exhibitions at Salon 94, an Upper East Side townhouse that was converted into a gallery by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly.

Lamb's exhibition, called Inventory, featured one-off pieces developed by the designer over the past two decades, including his Nanocrystaline Copper, Poly Rainbow and Boulder series.

According to Lamb, the retrospective was a chance to look back and put the finishing touches on collections created years ago.

"It was time to share Max's work as an assemblage," Salon 94 Design founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn told Dezeen.

"In constant making and motion — each body of work has a beautiful personal story."

With collections like Western Red Cedar, Lamb experimented with ways to assemble pieces of wood that were otherwise unusable, creating sculptural forms that work with the natural shape of the wood.

The exhibition featured multiple rooms – some with large, colourful arrays of Lamb's work, and others with more curated selections of works with similar materials.

In a separate section of the gallery, Oh showed her latest designs. Called Salvage 2.0, the exhibition presented pieces of furniture comprising of natural leather cords wrapped around found objects.

According to the designer, the Salvage series is a commentary on overconsumption and was created to show how people might make better use of what they already have around them.

"Jay's disciplined and focused practice is the perfect counterpart," Greenberg Rohatyn added, about the simultaneity of the show.

By bringing together forms that are still recognizable, Oh has stated that she hopes people will gain a new appreciation for the items they usually take for granted.

While past designs have included repurposed musical instruments, the Salvage 2.0 series incorporated toy biplanes, horses and telescopes; objects that were melded together using epoxy before being encased in rippled layers of leather cord.

This collection includes a bench, armchair, floor lamp and a planter. Wrapped in different colour variations of the material, the works have even more contrast and definition than earlier pieces.

"Max and Jay — though to different affect — rely on their hand, so every work is unique," said Greenberg Rohatyn.

"Both insist on small footprints and economies. Jay's forms are built out of other people's defunct toys and plastics, and Max uses every off cut — whether a hole cut from a marble slab that becomes a leg for a table, or every cut of wood that becomes part of a puzzle-piece chair."

Recently, Lamb presented his cardboard furniture with Gallery Fumi at Sized Studio during Frieze LA.

Oh's Salvage Chair, an earlier iteration of the work at Salon 94, was shortlisted in the furniture design category during Dezeen Awards 2023.

The photography is by Sean Davidson.

The Inventory and Salvage 2.0 are on show from 29 February to 20 April, 2024 at Salon 94 Design. For more exhibitions, talks and events in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide. 

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Texas-based ICON has unveiled Phoenix, a robotic-arm-mounted 3D printer that can create fully-enclosed, multi-storey structures from a low-carbon mixture, at SXSW.

ICON revealed the demountable crane-based 3D printer during a talk held as part of the annual SXSW festival in Austin,

Phoenix allows ICON to construct multi-storey houses with enclosed systems. It said that it is currently building a prototype outside its headquarters in Austin that will have a dome-like enclosed roof.

At 70 feet tall, the crane-like system allows for higher construction than ICON's current printer, the Vulcan, which has a gantry system with the chassis closer to the ground. According to the company, it can print structures up to 27 feet tall (8.2 metres).

ICON's proprietary cementitious admixture Lavacrete is distributed from the crane using a "highly integrated" system via a nozzle stabilised by gyroscopes.

Like other 3D-printing construction technologies, it lays layer upon layer of the mix, slowly creating walls that are supported by steel but do not need the extensive formwork – usually wooden – that characterises much concrete construction.

Because of the crane system, the machine can also build multiple structures in a single vicinity with only minor adjustments to the set up of the machine, and only a few people are required on-site to monitor the progress.

The advancement follows one made last year by technology firm Hannah on its multi-storey 3D-printed home, the first in the country.

ICON announces "lowest carbon residential building system"

In addition to the announcement of Phoenix, ICON also announced the development of a new material mixture as well as the integration of AI into its systems.

The material, called CarbonX is the "lowest carbon residential building system ready to be used at scale", according to the company. An MIT study published concurrently with the talk used the material to claim the benefits of 3D-printed construction for embodied carbon.

"The life cycle assessment results of the white paper show that the embodied and operational impacts of 3D-printed homes are lower than stick-framed construction," said ICON.

CarbonX will be not be used by ICON until after April 2024, and the company said that it will make it available for use by other firms.

Other announcements included Codex, a repository of "ready-to-print" designs that includes more than 60 designs, with three of the five collections created by Danish architecture studio BIG, with whom ICON has collaborated on a 3D-printed community with 100 homes in Texas.

ICON says the repository will continue to grow and be available for developers to select designs for residences.

The company also said that it is launching an AI program so that "anyone" can design 3D-printable home schemas through the ICON Vitruvius platform.

In addition to the 100-home community, ICON is also collaborating with BIG and hotelier Liz Lambert for the El Cosmico resort and homes in Marfa.

The imagery is courtesy of ICON. 

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Greek researcher and visual artist Ioannis Michaloudis has created the Air Swipe bag for fashion brand Coperni using NASA-produced silica aerogel that was developed to "catch stardust".

The lightweight bag was unveiled at Coperni's F/W 2024 runway show during Paris Fashion Week.

The small bag is made from silica aerogel, which Michaloudis said is the "lightest sold [material] on planet Earth". The material – which has a chemical composition similar to gas – forms the shell of the bag, while the interior is air.

This means that the total volume of the bag consists only of one per cent solid material.

The Air Swipe bag has a dimension of 27 by 16 by 6 centimetres and weighs 35 grams.

It is formed in a stainless steel mould with a "supercritical" drying process, which uses specific temperatures and pressures to transform liquids into glass.

Michaloudis said that the bag is delicate but not fragile and that the material can handle pressure of 4,000 times its weight and heat up to 1,200 degrees Celsius. Silica aerogel's properties were first developed by scientist Peter Tsou.

"It can withstand three times the speed of a bullet," Michaloudis told Dezeen.

"And that's why [NASA] has selected the material to catch stardust," he continued, referring to the cells attached to deep-space satellites for collecting high-speed space materials.

The light-blue colour of the material comes from the "nanopores" on its volume, which Michaloudis compared to the sky of the planet.

"It is very ethereal, but it protects our planet," he said.

"It is our dress. The dress of the planet is our sky," he continued, linking the atmosphere with the material's use as a fashion accessory.

Michaloudis has worked with NASA for decades on a variety of projects and was on the team researching the material and its applications.

The Air Swipe bag and material represent an "in-between space" between science and art, the researcher added.

"The material is between something that does and something that does not exist. It too is in this in-between state, like an angelic state," he said. "This is the in-between space of the Coperni bag."

Michaloudis works as a researcher for several institutions in Greece and abroad and worked with Coperni to conceptualise the bag.

Coperni has released a number of clothing items and accessories that use advanced technology, including a dress created with spray-on fibers.

This Paris Fashion Week also saw Danish brand Samsoe Samsoe host a pop-up space with a counter made from old T-shirts.

The photography is courtesy of Ioannis Michaloudis.

The post Coperni unveils Air Swipe bag made of 99 per cent air appeared first on Dezeen.

Architects Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger are creating a 30-metre-tall tower in the Swiss Alps, which is being 3D-printed with concrete by technology university ETH Zurich.

Named Tor Alva, or White Tower, the building will become the world's "tallest 3D-printed structure" once complete in Mulegns later this year, according to Hansmeyer and Dillenburger.

ETH Zurich has commenced the 3D printing process and so far created eight out of 32 structural columns.

Hansmeyer and Dillenburger are developing Tor Alva to promote the potential of 3D printing with concrete and how the technology can help minimise the amount of material used in construction.

"At 30 meters in height, Tor Alva will be the tallest 3D-printed structure in the world," said the architects.

"The goal was to advance the state of 3D concrete printing to explore how this technology can reduce material consumption while offering a new freedom of design," Hansmeyer told Dezeen.

Tor Alva will sit atop an existing building that was formerly used as a blacksmith's shop. The first eight of its Y-shaped columns will form part of its first floor.

The columns have been 3D printed using a concrete extrusion process developed at ETH Zurich by its Digital Building Technologies (DBT) team, during which they are reinforced with steel.

According to Hansmeyer, it is the first time the printing method has been used for structural components, as it had previously only been used for decorative features.

"One of the challenges was to create columns that would be thin-shelled and hollow in order to reduce material usage while maintaining structural strength," said Hansmeyer.

"Such thin-shell concrete prints are so far predominantly used as a hull or stay-in-place formwork that is filled with cast concrete and regular reinforcement," Hansmeyer continued.

"Our 3D-printed concrete has rebar integrated into it during the robotic printing process," he added. "The integrated rebar, combined with a post-tensioning system, gives the columns the necessary strength that allows us to build 30 metres high."

Hansmeyer explained that 3D printing the material negates the need for formwork typically required with concrete construction and provides precise application so the material is only used where needed, minimising waste.

The construction method also allows the creation of complex geometries and bespoke components, as seen in the geometric patterns on the surfaces of Tor Alva's structure.

"In the tower's thin-walled, hollow columns, concrete is used only where it is structurally required, similar to optimised structures that we know from nature," said Hansmeyer. "This saves mass and material."

"Also, 3D printing allows a formwork-free fabrication," he added. "Even for complex geometries, custom formwork is not required, thereby further reducing material usage."

"Finally, it allows the easy fabrication of bespoke parts and non-standard geometries, and it offers a new freedom of design for architects."

The 32 Y-shaped columns that will make up the tower are being printed with geometric textured surfaces.

They will be connected without adhesives, using removable screws and post-tensioning cables to ensure the structure can be easily dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere in the future.

Once complete, Tor Alva will host music and theatre performances and act as a "beacon" to attract visitors to the historic alpine village of Mulegns, the architects said.

A spiral staircase will lead to a domed performance space on the top floor, with panoramic views of the surrounding landscape through the columns.

Tor Alva's total estimated print time is 900 hours and its full construction is expected to be completed in summer 2024.

ETH Zurich has also used 3D printing to create a contoured concrete ceiling slab designed to save energy and formwork made from recyclable mineral foam.

Other structures made by 3D printing include a store in Amsterdam with rippling facade tiles and a house in Texas designed by BIG and ICON.

The images are by Hansmeyer and Dillenburger.

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Following the release of technology brand Samsung's first smart ring, we round up 10 recent wearable technology designs, including a smart menstrual cup and an air-purifying collar.

While the concept of wearable technology can be applied to a wide range of products, they are often designed to bring health benefits to the wearer or to blur the line between digital and physical experiences.

Read on to see 10 notable examples of wearable technology, ranging from worship-tracking prayer beads to an artificial larynx.

Galaxy smart ring by Samsung

Samsung's Galaxy smart ring functions as a health tracker enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI). According to the brand, it will offer a simplified way to track many different body metrics and support wellness goals.

Among its features are tracking capabilities for sleep and activities, as well as period and fertility tracking. The AI function will help the ring, which comes in silver, gold and black, to provide more personalised insights.

Find out more about Samsung's Galaxy smart ring ›

Viture One by Layer

Designed to stream immersive video anywhere, the Viture One smart glasses display a cinematic 120-inch screen. This appears to float in front of the user's eyes in virtual reality, letting them view content without using any other devices.

"We see one of the biggest use cases being streaming media and communicating with friends, colleagues and family nomadically," Layer studio founder Benjamin Hubert told Dezeen.

Find out more about Viture One ›

Neural Sleeve by Cionic and Fuseproject

Designer Yves Béhar's studio Fuseproject worked with startup Cionic to develop the Neural Sleeve. The bionic wearable was designed to correct muscle movements in people with limited mobility, using electric pulses and AI to do so.

The sleeve, which wraps around the leg, uses functional electrical stimulation (FES) to help with walking difficulties. It was described by Béhar as "a way to sort of remote control your own leg".

Find out more about the Neural Sleeve ›

Emm menstrual cup by Emm

UK-based startup Emm designed a smart menstrual cup with the same name, which can be inserted into the body like a tampon.

The cup, which is made from medical-grade silicone, has a conical shape and is fitted with smart technology that tracks your period. Built-in biosensors track the user's blood loss and flow rate as well as the length of their period and menstrual cycle.

Find out more about the menstrual cup ›

Dyson Zone by Dyson

Technology company Dyson launched its Dyson Zone, which was described in UK media as "bizarre" and "an air vacuum", to filter air pollution and reduce noise in urban environments.

The wearable-technology gadget combines a set of headphones that feature active noise cancellation with a removable plastic visor. This wraps around the front of the face to filter out allergens, gases and dust.

Find out more about Dyson Zone ›

Click to Pray eRosary by the Vatican

Released by the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network and designed to appeal to young people, the Click to Pray eRosary has a crucifix interface that tracks the user's worship as well as health data.

To use the rosary, the wearer makes the sign of the cross on the haptic interface of the cross, which is connected to a smartphone app. This lets users monitor the progress of each prayer and provides them with an audio prayer guide.

Find out more about the eRosary ›

Wear A+ by Respiray

Wearable air purifier Wear A+ (above and main image) was made for people suffering from allergies. It is worn around the neck like a collar and filters out irritants such as pollen and dust.

The collar also blows clean air towards the wearer, creating what tech company Respiray calls "a bubble of clean air" around their face.

Find out more about Wear A+ ›

Tenuto 2 by MysteryVibe

Tenuto 2 is an innovative sex toy – a piece of wearable technology designed to be worn over the penis to help the user achieve and maintain an erection.

The gadget, which resembles a penis ring, has four motors that vibrate to improve circulation and two "wings" at its base that prevent blood from draining away. It was designed as a more affordable and accessible alternative to erectile dysfunction medications.

Find out more about Tenuto 2 ›

Syrinx by Takeuchi Masaki

People who have lost their larynx to cancer were the target group for Syrinx, a wearable voice box. It functions like an electrolarynx, manually vibrating the neck to create a noise that the user can then form into words using their mouth and tongue.

However, the Syrinx is an update to traditional electrolarynxes in that it creates a personalised voice for each user, based on recordings of their own former voice.

Find out more about Syrinx ›

Vision Pro by Apple

Designed to be a "spatial computer", tech company Apple's Vision Pro headset lets wearers project visual applications in a 3D environment controlled by eye and hand movements.

It was created to usher in a "new era of computing", in which the computer is projected in front of the user, and can be adjusted to blot out or blend in with their physical surroundings. The interface also includes a keyboard function and can be controlled by voice commands.

Find out more about the Vision Pro ›

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British design studio Layer has devised prototypes of three futuristic internet routers, including one with the ability to host Star Wars-style holographic video chats, in a project with Deutsche Telekom.

Layer worked with Deutsche Telekom's Design and Customer Experience team on the project, titled Concept T, to explore the future of communications and connectivity.

The project encompasses concepts for three potential new products, which either bundle current router functionalities with additional features or imagine new ways of using the device.

Concept View is a holographic smart home hub where three-dimensional visuals appear projected in a small dome over the base unit, similar to how holoprojector devices are portrayed in the Star Wars movies.

Layer suggests the hub could be used to visualise and control other devices in the home, interact with an AI-powered virtual assistant and make video calls, all with people and data appearing as 3D holograms.

The second product, Concept Level, sticks to more typical router functionality but adds modularity, creating a sculptural object that is tailored to each user's home and can be reconfigured and upgraded as needed.

The different modules include a WiFi-sensing element, a mesh repeater to boost WiFi range and a computational module for Web3 uses such as blockchain verification.

The third product, Concept Buddy, imagines a roving router housed in the form of a friendly-looking robot assistant.

This robot could display information on its head unit or project it onto a surface and could be used for tasks such as monitoring the smart home, conducting video calls or even reporting on air quality.

Layer has made a fully functional prototype of the holographic smart home hub and semi-functional prototypes of Level and Buddy, with working displays and lighting.

Layer founder Benjamin Hubert told Dezeen that the Concept T project was driven by the idea of "enriching the router".

"Routers are essential but often pushed away, behind things, in cupboards, on the floor," he said. "And whilst they provide a core role, they could also do so much more to truly become the most essential piece of kit you own to improve your connectivity experience."

"The red thread of these concepts perhaps helps to raise the question of: should a router be more prominently positioned and utilised in your living space?" Hubert added.

In View, he said, the holographic display brings loved ones, information and AI more emotively into the room and brings "connectivity in all its guises to life".

In the modular Level router, the idea is once again to create a more emotional connection to an object, this time by making it personalised and decorative.

"No two lives are really the same, so some people might require more computing power to crunch through Web 3.0 tasks whilst another wants a display to understand their connectivity or states of the home better," said Hubert.

"This choice, coupled with the added desirability of adding more visual interest to your router, led to Level."

For Buddy, there is an emotional connection created through the anthropomorphised form with expressive blinking "eyes", while the added assistance functionality allows the router to be seen as a more essential product.

Similar-looking "friendly" robots were a feature at this year's CES, with both Samsung and LG launching products. Hubert believes it's a trend that is going to accelerate as AI advances and becomes more embedded in our lives.

"The trend looks to try and create literal and metaphorical vehicles that demystify and make AI more approachable by giving it more human and emotional qualities – without becoming overbearing or uncanny," said Hubert.

Layer's prototypes were on display at last week's Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, within a stand also designed by Layer.

The View prototype included software, hardware, mechanical and electrical engineering, alongside a dedicated UI and UX design. Visitors to the stand were able to have their faces scanned by View's depth cameras to see themselves as a hologram.

Concept T is Layer's second concept project for Deutsche Telekom after the duo presented smart devices modelled on homeware at Milan design week 2022.

According to Hubert, this kind of speculative design allows the studio to push the boundaries of how radical a product can be by working with fewer constraints.

"That's why these concepts are quite progressive," said Hubert. "Where at a glance most people wouldn't consider them to be routers, hopefully they can appreciate the added functionality a router may have and how you might use one."

"The 'what if' often inspires the next generation of products and services we use in reality, and these concept projects can influence everyone's decisions on the type of products and services that a brand and consumer might invest in."

Other products unveiled at this the Mobile World Congress tech fair this year include Samsung's first smart ring and a laptop with a transparent screen by Lenovo.

The Mobile World Congress took place at the Gran Via convention centre in Barcelona, Spain, from 26 to 29 February 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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This week on Dezeen, electronics brand Lenovo unveiled a laptop concept with a transparent screen that allows users to see through the device.

Revealed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the concept device is called the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop Concept.

It features a 17.3-inch Micro-LED display that has adjustable levels of transparency as well as a detachable, transparent base.

Also showcased at the Mobile World Congress was a smart ring created by electronics company Samsung, which is set to launch later this year.

Designed as a comprehensive health tracker with AI insights to track body metrics and support wellness. Its features include indicators surrounding sleep quality, which will include a sleep apnoea feature capable of detecting signs of the breathing disorder.

In architecture news, German car brand Mercedes-Benz unveiled its first branded skyscraper in North America.

Named Mercedes-Benz Places, the 67-storey residential skyscraper will be designed in collaboration with SHoP Architects and developed by JDS Development Group.

Elsewhere in the US, a trio of incomplete skyscrapers located in downtown Los Angeles have been covered with colourful graffiti, sparking public debate about the abandoned development.

With the project halted in 2019 due to lack of funding, the Central City Association of Los Angeles highlighted the graffiti art as a "representation of the very real neglect that downtown Los Angeles has gone through over the past decade".

In other architecture news, global studio Snøhetta unveiled the Beijing City Library in China, designed to emulate the feeling of "sitting under a tree".

Drawing on natural landscapes, the library aims to allow visitors to connect with the outside and features a glass-lined building filled with tall, tree-like columns and hill-shaped rooms.

Also this week, British architecture studio Foster + Partners revealed 50 Electric Boulevard, a 18,580-metre-square office building within London's Battersea Power Station development, featuring a curved facade.

In design news, Dutch studio Raw Color released an IKEA collection, named Tsammans, comprising 18 pieces of furniture, homeware and lighting defined by the use of a bold colour palette.

Incorporating 15 different colours across the collection, Raw Color designed each item with no less than two colours.

Popular projects this week included a 12th-century church topped with a folding roof in Slovenia, an angular extension added to a museum in porto and a fully automated car park in Hangzhou.

Our latest lookbooks featured tranquil interiors with oversized windows that frame lush views and closed staircases in tactile materials and sculptural shapes.

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The post This week Lenovo unveiled a transparent-screen laptop appeared first on Dezeen.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, electronics brand Lenovo has unveiled a laptop concept with a transparent screen that allows users to see through the device.

Lenovo describes the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop Concept – also referred to as Project Crystal – as "the industry's first laptop with a 17.3-inch Micro-LED transparent display".

The proof-of-concept device features a display with adjustable transparency and a detachable see-through base that can be used as a keyboard or tablet.

Instead of physical buttons, keys are projected onto this smooth, flat surface of nano-optical glass.

Lenovo's transparent laptop is so futuristic pic.twitter.com/84t25KDnWw

— Ben Geskin (@BenGeskin) February 26, 2024

The proof-of-concept was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

Bringing a stylus close to the keyboard causes the keys to disappear so it can be used for drawing. Artists and designers can sketch directly onto the surface and see their creations appear on the screen.

The laptop's chassis also incorporates a rear-facing camera that allows the device to recognise and interact with objects placed behind it using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) software.

At the Mobile World Congress (MCW) trade show, Lenovo demonstrated these AR capabilities by placing a flower in a vase behind the screen and having a virtual butterfly fly around it.

The technology could allow digital artists to view what is directly behind the laptop while sketching on the drawing pad with a dedicated stylus while interior designers could overlay virtual furniture or decor on top of an existing space.

"The transparent screen opens up new avenues of work collaboration and efficiency by enabling the interaction with physical objects and overlaying digital information to create unique user-generated content," Lenovo said.

The concept is Lenovo's first foray into the world of transparent displays, which several companies have so far used for televisions.

Chinese electronics firm Xiaomi unveiled a see-through TV with an edge-to-edge transparent display in 2020, while LG's Signature OLED T was a standout at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

The Project Crystal display features MicroLED technology, which uses microscopic LEDs to enable light control at the pixel level and a high contrast ratio.

Lenovo claims the display's high colour saturation and brightness of 1,000 nits ensures good visibility both indoors and outdoors in any light condition.

When the pixels are at maximum brightness the display appears as a fully opaque surface while dimming them increases the transparency.

The prototype device features a relatively low resolution of 720 pixels but Lenovo is confident that MicroLED technology will continue to evolve to provide better image quality and durability.

Lenovo currently has no plans to bring the Project Crystal laptop to market but is instead hoping to demonstrate potential uses for technologies that might appear in future products.

Other experimental projects from Lenovo include the Yoga Book 9i – the "world's first" laptop with two full-sized screens – which the company presented at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show.

The Mobile World Congress is on at the Gran Via convention centre in Barcelona, Spain, from 26 to 29 February 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Samsung has previewed its first smart ring at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, positioning it as a comprehensive health tracker enhanced with AI insights.

The Galaxy Ring is set to launch later this year and, according to Samsung, will offer a simplified way to track many different body metrics and support wellness goals.

The South Korean brand is also presenting the wearable as part of its vision for integrating artificial intelligence with mobile products, which it calls its "Galaxy AI Vision".

First look at the Samsung Galaxy Ring pic.twitter.com/J6l3GtIxmP

— Parker Burton (@imparkerburton) February 26, 2024

Samsung has unveiled its first smart ring

In a blog post, Samsung digital health head Hon Pak said that portable devices will become the primary access point for AI and that the company's innovations would accelerate the technology's "global expansion".

"That's why we're thrilled to be introducing Samsung Galaxy Ring later this year – bringing Samsung's accumulated innovations to the smallest form for comfortable 24/7 wear," said Pak.

"As a new addition to our wearables portfolio, Galaxy Ring will offer users an all-new way to simplify everyday wellness, empowering them with greater insights and more ways to understand themselves day and night."

While Samsung has not yet detailed what sensors will be built into the device, it has said the tracking capabilities will include indicators around quality of sleep, including a sleep apnoea feature that can detect signs of the breathing disorder.

It will also include period and fertility tracking through its continuing partnership with app developer Natural Cycles, which is already part of the Galaxy Watch offering and utilises skin temperature measurements.

The ring will connect to an updated version of the company's digital wellness platform, Samsung Health, which will include a new "My Vitality Score" combining data around sleep, activity levels and heart rate variability.

Samsung says it will use AI to provide more personalised insights and tailored experiences, and that the AI will draw on the dataset collected from the 64 million monthly active users of its health platform.

The company is also working with partners to develop other complementary products that could fit within its ecosystem.

Samsung Galaxy Ring was just announced to come later this year!

For those who don't want to wear the smartwatch you can instead carry the tiniest wearable.

Are you a smart ring person? pic.twitter.com/qag125m6T6

— CID (@theonecid) February 26, 2024

Its surface is concave to avoid scratches

"For instance, you can create a more optimal sleep environment with a smart mattress that can fine-tune the ideal sleep temperatures for rest," said Pak.

Samsung is showing prototypes of the Galaxy Ring at European tech trade show the Mobile World Congress (MWC), with variants in silver, gold and black.

The design is minimal with no visible screens, lights or buttons, and the surface is slightly concave to avoid scratches.

2024 could prove to be the year of the smart ring, with Apple also rumoured to be working on a product following the release of its Vision Pro headset earlier this year.

While rings have so far represented only a small slice of the wearables market, a recent report has suggested that sales are expected to grow by nearly 30 per cent in the six years between 2022 and 2028.

The Oura ring is the current market leader while alternative designs include Oxygem – a product tailored to sufferers of sickle cell disease.

All images courtesy of Samsung.

The Mobile World Congress is on at the Gran Via convention centre in Barcelona, Spain from 26 to 29 February 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Dezeen Showroom: acoustic treatment brand Autex Acoustics has listed a selection of its sound-dampening products on Dezeen Showroom, including panels that mimic the appearance of wood and stone.

Travertine and marble have been used in decoration for thousands of years and remain popular finishes in contemporary interior design schemes.

Autex Acoustics has tapped into this enduring trend via its Stone collection, which features acoustic panels that combine the aesthetics of veined stone with sound-absorbing benefits.

Like other products in the brand's catalogue, the surfaces provide an affordable and flexible alternative to conventional acoustic cladding in a diverse selection of patterns, according to Autex Acoustics.

Another natural material that the brand has referenced through its range of sound-dampening items is wood – Acoustic Timber is informed by the knots and grain patterns present in real wooden veneers.

Baffles, tiles and panels are included in the collection, which offers a range of patterns that take cues from different wood species including pine, ash, oak, eucalyptus and walnut.

Designed specifically for ceilings and walls, the brand's Frontier system comprises 100 per cent polyester fibre shapes that help control noise levels.

Available in fins or rafts in a spectrum of 21 colourways, the placement of each panel can be customised with an adjustable channel and clip system.

Composition is also a product with sound-dampening properties and is durable enough for use in high-traffic environments.

The surfaces are installed with a drop technique similar to the way traditional wallpaper is hung.

Another acoustic system by the brand is its Groove product, a customisable router-cut panel system that offers patterned finishes for walls and ceilings.

The panels have a self-adhesive backing for easy installation and customisation options include six pattern suggestions and five angles.

Autex Acoustics was founded in 1967 and specialises in the design of sound-dampening products for offices and mixed-use interiors.

The brand now has showrooms across the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Australia.

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Space tourism company Space Perspective has unveiled a test capsule for its Neptune spacecraft that, buoyed by a giant balloon, could carry tourists into the stratosphere next year.

The pressurised capsule will embark on its first unmanned test flight over the coming weeks, with the aim to have a human-rated version of the spaceship ready for commercial flights by 2025.

Neptune is "only the third commercial suborbital spacecraft to ever be successfully built", according to Space Perspective, following Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo and Blue Origin's Crew Capsule.

The teardrop-shaped capsule was designed by London-based studio Of My Imagination to provide a markedly different experience from its forebearers.

Hauled by a hydrogen-filled balloon instead of a rocket engine, the Neptune capsule will travel at only around 12 miles per hour while generating a fraction of the emissions.

Travellers' "journey to the edge of space" will last six hours – compared to Virgin Galactic's 90 minutes – allowing them to enjoy onboard amenities including a cocktail bar and Wifi access.

"We like to joke that every self-respecting spaceship should have a bar," co-founder Jane Poynter told Dezeen in an exclusive interview last year.

"And we talk about that because you really can't do that on a rocket-based flight. It just is emblematic of how gentle it is that you can actually have a bar where people will be able to stand at and have a drink, and cheers."

Since the spaceship won't experience zero-gravity altitudes, it will also have a fully functioning toilet, which the company is calling the Space Spa.

At 4.9 metres in diameter, with an internal volume of 60 cubic metres, the spaceship has roughly two times the volume of its rivals.

According to Space Perspective, it will be the largest human spacecraft in operation save for the space stations, accommodating a captain and eight passengers at an expected cost of $125,000 per seat compared to $450,000 on SpaceShipTwo.

Its size also makes room for the capsule to accommodate the largest windows ever flown to space, according to the company.

"The space capsule is like nothing the world has ever seen," said Space Perspective co-founder Taber MacCallum.

"We are on the cusp of a staggering shift – not only in the way we humans experience space but also what we conjure in our minds when we think of the spaceship that gets us there. We are redefining the category and paving the way for accessible space travel for years to come."

Manufactured at Space Perspective's campus in Florida, the test capsule is a fully functional has not had its interior fitted out.

The company plans to conduct its first manned test flights later this year, with plans to start sending the 1,750 people who bought advance tickets for a Neptune flight into space starting in 2025.

The Space Balloon has already been built and tested while the Marine Spaceport Voyager ship, from which the spacecraft will launch, is currently in the final stages of preparation.

Space Perspective has yet to lock down a supplier for the hydrogen needed to propel the balloon, which will need to come from renewable sources for the company to achieve its goal of offering carbon-neutral spaceflight.

Rival company World View has designed its space balloon to work with helium gas instead – a limited and rapidly dwindling resource that is needed for more life-and-death applications such as MRI scans in hospitals.

All images courtesy of Space Perspective.

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Swedish designers Gustav Winsth and Alexander Lervik have unveiled a chair that was designed in virtual reality and brought to life by skilled metalworkers who normally work on motorcycles.

The Reality chair formed part of the Stockholm Furniture Fair exhibition Älvsjö Gård, a showcase of collectable and limited-edition furniture pieces.

Winsth and Lervik developed the design through a series of virtual design sessions. Instead of meeting in person, they would put on virtual reality (VR) goggles and come together via the digital platform Gravity Sketch.

This led them to create a completely freeform design, featuring bulging volumes that are reminiscent of inflatables.

"Drawing in the VR world is like working with clay," Winsth told Dezeen. "It's such a great tool for creating these kinds of surfaces."

Rather than allowing the design to be shaped by physical constraints, Lervik and Winsth waited until later in the process to think about how the chair might be manufactured.

Keen to produce the design in metal, the only solution was to work with skilled sheet-metal specialists who typically use their skills to shape motorcycle gas tanks.

The bulbous shapes were created through a process of manual pressure turning.

Winsth sees the project as an example of how futuristic technology can create new possibilities for traditional craft techniques.

"To create these really soft shapes, you can't go to a large-scale manufacturer," he stated. "You have to go back in time and find a real craftsman, someone who can make something out of nothing."

The result is a chair made entirely out of polished aluminium, with the only visible weld lines located where the smoothly curved seat meets the legs and the backrest.

The Reality chair is the first collaboration between Lervik, who is well-established on the Scandinavian design scene, and Winsth, who is one of Sweden's most promising young talents.

Lervik initiated the partnership after being impressed by how Winsth was already using VR in his design practice. A recent example is the Tension Trolley, launched by Swedish brand Lammhults, which was designed in the same way.

"I'm fascinated by new technology," Lervik said.

The collaboration involved the pair both bringing sketches into the virtual space. Winsth would use hand-held controllers to translate the designs into full-size 3D visualisations they could critique and refine.

"Drawing furniture in the air, with me in my studio and Gustav in his, and then seeing the finished result next to other armchairs – it's like magic," said Lervik.

"When I take off my headset, it's almost like I forget it's not physically there."

The Reality chair was on show at Älvsjö Gård in two versions.

One had a polished silver finish while the other featured a red colour gradation that was achieved with the help of a specialist airbrush painting studio.

The chairs were displayed alongside VR binoculars, allowing visitors to step into the virtual studio and understand more about the design process.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Alexander Lervik Studio & Gallerie (@alexanderlervikstudiogallerie)

Winsth used hand-held controllers to translate sketches into 3D visualisations

Älvsjö Gård was one of several curated exhibitions at this year's Stockholm Furniture Fair, which offered a positive response to the challenges facing the traditional trade fair format.

Other designers presenting their work at Älvsjö Gård included Carsten in der Elst, who attracted attention with his Greywacke Offcut Collection furniture made from sandstone offcuts and his playful Pasta Chair.

The photography is by Martin Brusewitz.

Älvsjö Gård was on show at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, which was open to the public from 7 to 11 February 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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The latest edition of our Dezeen Debate newsletter features Brian Eno's multicoloured illuminated record player. Subscribe to Dezeen Debate now.

Ambient music pioneer Eno has unveiled an updated version of his illuminated record player featuring two eccentric Perspex circles. The turntable is being exhibited at London's Paul Stolper Gallery.

Readers were enamoured with the design – one exclaimed, "I need one, right now!" Another praised its "joyful design," remarking that "the world can use more joy."

Other stories in this week's newsletter that fired up the comments section included the reveal of the finalists for this year's Mies van der Rohe Award, Nendo's lopsided glass design for Japan's oldest beer brand and THISS Studio's extension of an interwar house in east London.

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Scientists from South Korea's Yonsei University have invented what they believe to be a sustainable, high-protein food in the form of "beef rice", made by growing cow cells in grains of rice.

Tinged a pale pink from the cell culturing process, the hybrid food contains more protein and fat than standard rice while having a low carbon footprint, leading its creators to see it as a potential future meat alternative.

The beef rice was made by inserting muscle and fat stem cells from cows into grains of rice and leaving them to grow in a Petri dish.

Because the rice grains are porous and have a rich internal structure, the cells can grow there in a similar way to how they would within an animal. A coating of gelatine – in this case, fish-derived – further helps the cells to attach to the rice.

Although beef rice might sound like a form of genetically modified food, there is no altering of DNA in the plants or animals. Instead, this process constitutes a type of cell-cultured or lab-grown meat but with the beef grown inside rice.

In a paper published in the journal Matter, the Yonsei University researchers explain that their process is similar to that used to make a product already sold in Singapore – a cultured meat grown in soy-based textured vegetable protein (TVP).

Soy and nuts are the first foods that have been used for animal cell culturing, they say, but their usefulness is limited because they are common allergens and do not have as much cell-holding potential as rice.

The nutritional gains for their beef rice are also currently small, but the researchers from Yonsei University's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering say that with further optimisation, more cells and therefore more protein could be packed in.

The hybrid rice contains 3890 milligrams of protein and 150 milligrams of fat per 100 grams – just 310 milligrams more protein and 10 milligrams more fat than standard rice.

"Although hybrid rice grains still have a lower protein content than beef, advances in technology that can improve the cell capacity of rice grains will undoubtedly improve the nutritional content of hybrid rice," the researchers said in their paper.

The scientists also believe the product could be inexpensively commercialised and tout the short time frame required to boost nutrition through culturing.

Whereas beef production usually takes one to three years and rice 95 to 250 days, they say their cell culturing process took less than 10 days.

"Imagine obtaining all the nutrients we need from cell-cultured protein rice," said researcher Sohyeon Park. "I see a world of possibilities for this grain-based hybrid food. It could one day serve as food relief for famine, military ration or even space food."

If commercialised, the hybrid grain is expected to have a low carbon footprint, similar to growing standard rice, because there would be no need to farm lots of animals. While the stem cells used for the process are extracted from live animals, they can proliferate indefinitely and don't require animal slaughter.

An obstacle for some may be the taste; the cell culturing process slightly changes the texture and smell of the rice, making it more firm and brittle and introducing odour compounds related to beef, almonds, cream, butter and coconut oil.

However, lead researcher Jinkee Hong told the Guardian that the foodstuff tastes "pleasant and novel".

The team is now planning to continue their research and work to boost the nutritional value of the hybrid rice by stimulating more cell growth.

Lab-grown and cultivated meats have been a subject of great interest and investment since 2013 when the world's first lab-grown burger was eaten live at a press conference.

However, scaling up production, clearing regulatory hurdles and creating an appealing taste and texture have proven a challenge, and there are few examples on sale anywhere in the world.

In the meantime, speculative designers have explored the issue. Leyu Li recently created three conceptual products that, similar to beef rice, combine lab-grown meat with vegetables, calling them Broccopork, Mushchicken and Peaf.

All images courtesy of Yonsei University.

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Google has opened a building serving its North American operations in New York City that is housed in a 1930s rail terminal restored and adapted by architecture studios CookFox Architects and Gensler.

Developed by Oxford Properties, the 232-foot-tall (70 metres), 12-storey office building houses Google's North American headquarters for global business organisation and is located on the west side of Manhattan, just north of the Tribeca neighbourhood.

Design architects on the project CookFox Architects adapted a 1930s railway terminal called St John's Terminal, which served as an end-point to the rail line that is now the High Line, to create the office building. The studio added nine floors on top of the restored original three floors.

CookFox Architects also sliced away part of the old terminal south of Houston Street, which runs parallel to the new entrance, exposing the building's structure.

"We cut the historic structure south of Houston Street, removing a dark tunnel and restoring the pedestrian connection between the Hudson Square neighbourhood and the westside waterfront," said CookFox Architects. "This strategic slicing exposes the rail beds and reveals the terminal's history to the public."

The building's original rail beds were left exposed on the facade and then covered in plantings, creating a linear overhang at its entrance.

"The rail beds within St. John's Terminal revealed in the cut facade as if in a section drawing, now feature a landscape that visually connects pedestrians and occupants to nature while enhancing the newly opened streetscape," said CookFox Architects.

International architecture studio Gensler led the project's interior architecture. The studio organised the interior around "neighbourhoods", orienting the design around the functioning of team units within the organisation.

"St John's Terminal is designed to support the needs of Google's teams passively and actively and to help Googlers do their best work faster and more efficiently," Gensler principal Carlos M. Martínez Flórez told Dezeen.

"Clustered work zones peppered with amenities, relaxation spaces, and circulation, pre-planned to quickly accommodate changes to the support spaces, will give individual teams a sense of ownership over their neighbourhoods so Googlers can live authentically throughout their entire work day while they collaborate shoulder-to-shoulder."

The building will accommodate a workforce of over 3,000 "Googlers", with an interior organised into 60 "neighbourhoods" that will act as central spaces for teams of roughly 20-50 workers, eliminating assigned desks in favour of flexible seating areas.

Other spaces include work lounges on every floor, cafes, terraces, micro-kitchens and event spaces such as theatres. Outside, 1.5 acres surrounding the building have been planted with native New York plant species.

The building has LEED v4 Platinum Certification for its core and shell development and is pursuing LEED v4 Platinum Certification for interiors, according to the team.

Its adaption is "projected to save approximately 78,400 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emission" as compared to a new structural build, according to the team.

Other sustainable design strategies incorporated into its design include solar panels, rainwater retention and the use of wood reclaimed from the Coney Island boardwalk after Hurricane Sandy.

Google announced the purchase of the St. John's Terminal building in December 2018, pledging to double its New York workforce over the next ten years.

"Over 14,000 Googlers now call New York home, which is up from 7,000 employees in 2018 when we first announced our involvement with the project," said Google in a statement.

"We've not only kept our pledge to double our New York workforce over the decade that followed that announcement, but we've done it in half the time."

At the building's opening, New York Governor Kathy Hochul remarked on the development.

"You're going to take a property that for decades people just ignored or went past and never saw a future in. But you did. That's the genius of Google. Seeing possibilities where others are not able." said Hochul.

The headquarters is part of the company's master plan for the surrounding site, which will encompass two other structures currently under construction at 315 Hudson Street and 345 Hudson Street.

It joins a number of recently completed projects on New York's West Side, including BIG's twisting One High Line buildings and Field Operations' Gansevoort Peninsula park.

The photography is courtesy of Google

Project credits:

Core and shell
Design architect: CookFox Architects, D.P.C
Site developer: Oxford Properties
Architect of record: Adamson Associates, P.C.
Civil engineer: Phillip Habib & Associates
General contractor: Turner Construction
Landscape designer: Future Green Studio Corp.
Lighting designer: Lumen Architecture, PLLC

Interior
Lead interior architect and designer: Gensler
General contractor: Structure Tone— Turner, a Joint Venture
Landscape design: Future Green Design Corp.
Landscape architect of record: Langan Engineering and Environmental Services, Inc.
Lighting designers: Castelli Design, Fisher Marantz Stone Inc., Lightswitch, Lighting Workshop Inc. L'Observatoire International, Inc.

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London-based start-up Nothing is trying to upend the consumer-tech industry. In this interview, the company's design director, Adam Bates, discusses how.

Since being founded by Chinese-Swedish entrepreneur Carl Pei three years ago, Nothing has moved at breakneck speed, releasing three wireless earbuds and two smartphones – with a third set to launch next month.

Counting iPod designer Tony Fadell and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman among an illustrious list of investors, the company's stated aim is to "make tech fun again".

"We're a bit bored"

Having joined Nothing as design director in early 2022 after spending 14 years at Dyson, Bates is tasked with ensuring that the brand's products deliver on that ambition.

"I think it's in a lot of our bones that there are some things that aren't right about these products," said Bates, referring to the current offering of smartphones from mainstream brands.

"And also that we're a bit bored," he added.

Bates suggests that the current state of monotony within the smartphone industry can be traced back to 2007 and the seismic launch of the original Apple iPhone.

"The iPhone in 2007 was a new format," he told Dezeen. "There were touchscreen phones before but the way they designed the interface – really we're still with that now."

"When something like that happens and then it catches and it gets traction, other people start doing it as well."

Prior to 2007, the mobile-phone industry had seen extensive innovation to varying degrees of success, as manufacturers released products that flipped, slid or twisted open, were ultra-thin or reimagined the keypad.

But the advent of the iPhone sparked a fierce game of catch-up within the industry that led to design experimentation becoming a casualty, Bates contends.

"It was a bit lost and uninspired and then came the iPhone, which was this massive step-change, and everyone focused on Apple and that format, and in the process of doing that a whole industry was built that was quite rigid," he said.

"Maybe in that process of trying to get there, people forgot about thinking of new ideas, and then also customers maybe stopped wanting new ideas."

Seventeen years and 36 iPhone iterations later, Nothing argues that the magic has worn off and that it's time for new ideas to make a comeback.

"There's a bit of trusting our gut instinct"

Designed with extensive input from Nothing founding partner Teenage Engineering, a Swedish tech studio, the brand's Phone (1), launched in 2022, sought to break away from the sleek slab aesthetic of most smartphones.

Picking up on the design language of Nothing's first product, the Ear (1) earbuds, it featured a transparent back displaying its inner components and a light-up "glyph interface".

Hundreds of distinctively arranged LEDs illuminate to create patterns that indicate notifications from apps, incoming calls or charging status when the phone is face-down.

The phone was included in Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2022 list.

Released a year later, the second-generation Phone (2) focused on refinements such as a more ergonomic pillowed-glass back and extra glyph functions, as well as updates to Nothing's designed-in-house, monochromatic operating system.

Only another eight months on and the brand will soon launch the Phone (2a), touted as a low-cost alternative to the Phone (2).

Ear (1)'s successor, the Ear (2) and Ear (stick) – which is defined by a cylindrical twist-to-open case – complete the Nothing range of products, not including those produced by its sub-brand, CMF.

Bates explains how Nothing is attempting to ensure its designs stand out from the crowd.

"I guess for us to try and break out of it, we've got to trust ourselves as people that are interested in technology, that are creative, that care about the products that we use," he said.

"There's a bit of trusting our gut instinct of what excites us and what excited us in the past, because data is not going to lead us there – data is going to lead us to the same place as everyone else."

"Design hasn't got better"

Nothing's design aesthetic has a retro-futuristic element to it, referencing multiple tech designs from previous decades that broke the mould at the time – particularly Apple's transparent products in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

"There is a conscious element to that," Bates acknowledged. "When Apple was on such a roll surprising you every time, I guess there might be a nostalgia for that feeling, and maybe the visual language comes from that feeling."

The company's studio in King's Cross, London, is filled with all manner of old-school tech, from Gameboy Colors to Casio piano keyboards.

"Design hasn't got better now, it's always been really good," said Bates.

"So there's definitely a natural thing, which is to look at something from the 1970s with the same seriousness as something on some Instagram feed of new renders that people are putting out."

Bates confesses to being fascinated by companies that manage to sustain prolonged periods of design innovation.

"There's these golden eras in companies and they've got quite a lot in common with each other when you look at them," he said.

"Some people just manage to keep doing it – Nintendo just keep doing it, they have a flop and then they come back again, so they've got some magic which passes on through generations."

One such company is Dyson, where Bates was formerly head of design and product experience working on products including the feted Supersonic hairdryer.

"It did become more corporate as time went on, but it always operated quite a lot like a start-up," he recalled.

"A thing to bring with you from there is: challenge everything, don't take anything for granted, don't trust anything unless you've seen it with your own eyes and you've tested it yourself."

But while he says Dyson was "an amazing education", he argues there is a limit to what he can import to the design team at Nothing.

"Dyson was good at innovation and good at new ideas, so I can bring my experience there and see how that works here," he said.

"But at the same time, could they do a phone with exactly their approach? There are things that you just can't mess with, and Dyson just mess with everything."

One important point of difference between Dyson and Nothing is the pace of development. Including research, the Supersonic took five years in all, the Phone (1) just 10 months.

Now with six products in existence including two generations of its main lines, Bates says Nothing has no intention of slowing down.

"I think the general trend is going to speed up," he said.

That touches on a common current criticism of the tech industry: that unnecessarily tight release cycles have stifled innovation and experimentation.

So how will Nothing ensure that its products stay "fun" when moving at such a speed?

Bates is hopeful that the company's strong cultural focus on design will ensure that it continues to test boundaries.

"We're not just here to make money – loads of companies make money," he said. "Some of the designers I've been able to hire are some of the best in the business and could probably work anywhere."

"They've chosen to work here because they want to do something different, so we have to hold each other to account I guess."

"If you're not in the game you can't do anything"

Just how far the Nothing will push the envelope is an open question – its phones stick with the scrollable, rectangular LED screen zeitgeist that has dominated since the iPhone, and the brand has not yet indicated plans to move away from this format.

Another major challenge for the smartphone industry is sustainability. According to Deloitte, the devices generate 146 million tons of CO2 each year worldwide, mostly linked to the extraction of the many precious minerals they contain.

Nothing has taken some steps to reduce the environmental impact of its products. For instance, Phone (2) uses recycled aluminium, plastic, tin, copper and steel, renewable energy in its assembly plant and plastic-free packaging.

Its packaging displays the lifecycle carbon of products, with Phone (2) carrying a footprint of 53.45 kilograms CO2 or equivalent emissions – eight per cent less than the Phone (1).

In comparison, ethical smartphone company Fairphone's fourth-generation phone's lifecycle carbon emissions were 43 kilograms, while the least-polluting version of the iPhone 15 generates 66 kilograms.

"The repairability thing is clearly the way to go," said Bates, referring to a push from campaigners and some regulators for tech brands to prolong their products' lifespans.

"Maybe there are Nothing products in the future where you can touch the battery, and you can take the battery out, and we're back to those days where you take the rear cover off."

However, he indicated that these sorts of changes could be some way off yet as the brand continues to find its feet.

"If you're not in the game you can't do anything. If you do too much too soon, or if you kind of pin yourself to something, we will not survive, and then we're all just at the mercy of Apple, Samsung, Oppo, Google."

The photography is courtesy of Nothing unless otherwise stated.

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Design collective Panorámica has created a machine that utilises artificial intelligence and a set of prompts to generate unique pieces of furniture based on a repository of Mexican design styles during Mexico City art week.

Showcased at the design section of the Zona Maco art fair in Mexico City, the exhibition was called Anybody Can Be a Mexican Designer with a subheading that disclaimed "even if you are not a designer nor Mexican".

The exhibition showcased the collective's machine inside a white booth backed by a massive screen.

The machine itself is a large, white wood-trimmed box with a small screen, a coin-insertion slot and a ticket printer. Panorámica said that the look of the machine itself was influenced by the minimalist modernism practised by the German Ulm School of design in the mid-20th century.

After inserting a 10-peso coin ($0.59), users were guided through a sequence of prompts including typology, periods in Mexico's history – from the Neolithic to the contemporary – as well as variations in colour and degrees of decoration.

The machine has a reference bank with an archive of images drawn from a "wide spectrum of what we commonly imagine about design in Mexico," according to the collective. The software involved included a mix of Arduino, TouchDesigner and the OpenAI artificial intelligence application programming interface (AIAPI).

The combination of prompts was the processed with an image of the resulting piece of furniture displayed on a screen.

The collective called the machine a "living provocation", asking the users to reassess certain assumptions about cultural provenance, accreditation and machine-led creation. 

"By replacing the human in certain aspects of the creative process, it forces us to rethink what we understand by creativity and authorship," said Panorámica.

"The machine challenges the traditional notion that design is a purely human domain, opening a dialogue about the role of technology in the evolution of design," it continued.

"It confronts us with the possibility that authenticity in design does not lie in mere adherence to aesthetics, references, and recognizable styles, but in the constant search for genuine and meaningful expressions."

The studio also noted that the machine was meant to challenge fixed notions of the identity of Mexican design itself.

Panorámica believes it is a marker of the "turning point" that machine-learning-based image generation software represents for design and creativity in general.

"Mexican design, as we know it, is revealed not as a fixed entity, but as a constantly changing formula, susceptible to being redefined and expanded, not only within the borders of Mexico but on the global stage," said the collective.

"This machine is not just a tool, but a powerful symbol of a new dawn in design and creativity, comparable to the introduction of the steam engine in the industrial revolution or the adoption of CAD technologies in the modernization of the design process."

For more on how AI might affect the world of design, see the AItopia editorial series that Dezeen ran last year.

Panorámica was founded by designers José de la O, Ian Ortega, Jorge Diego Etienne, and Joel Escalona. Its past work ranges from more traditional design objects to exhibitions examining materiality in the Mexican context.

Other exhibitions that took place during Mexico City art week 2024 include an installation where Guadalajara-based studio Bolsón transformed a storefront with upcycled plastic upholstery.

The photography is by Achach Fotografía.

Zona Maco took place in Mexico City from 7 to 11 February 2024. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide. 

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Biomaterials have the potential to significantly cut carbon emissions but designers should approach them with caution to avoid creating a whole new set of problems, warns Sioban Imms.

The vision of a civilisation based on biomaterials is compelling: products, clothes and buildings made from materials that have been "grown", rather than derived from polluting, extractive fossil industries. The promise is not only lower emissions, but products that are more in tune with the environment – manufactured objects that are part of the natural cycle of life. And consumers are willing to pay a premium for such ostensibly "sustainable" products – 12 per cent more, according to a recent study by Bain.

However, in a bid to gain competitive advantage, marketing narratives surrounding biomaterials are regularly inflated or gloss over important details. Prefixing "bio" to a material name conjures a sense of being natural, compostable, and better all round for personal and environmental health.

Marketing narratives surrounding biomaterials are regularly inflated

But these claims can unravel, or at least become complicated, when researching a little deeper than the material classification, product name and strapline. A report from RepRisk found a 70 per cent increase in incidents of greenwashing between 2022 and 2023. Incoming legislation in the EU is specifically targeting this issue.

The definition and terminology around biomaterials is still evolving. For clarity, we're not talking here about biomaterial designed for implanting into the body, but biologically derived materials used in product, fashion and architecture.

Often grown using living micro-organisms like yeast, bacteria, cellulose and mycelium, they can be finely tuned at the nanoscale by engineering DNA sequences to produce specific properties. For example, UK company Colorfix tweaks the DNA of bacteria so that they excrete coloured pigments for dyeing textiles. Microbial manufacturing organisms like these tend to be fed, fermented and modified in controlled environments.

The substitution of fossil-derived, high-carbon materials for biomaterials is urgently important. A recently published study by Radboud Universiteit in the Netherlands concluded that biomaterials reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by an average of 45 per cent compared to fossil-based materials.

But biomaterials are not a magic bullet to the multi-faceted nature crisis industrial civilisation is causing. Especially important is avoiding what are sometimes called "regrettable substitutions" – whereby one material is replaced with another that merely introduces a new set of problems.

For example, BioCane disposable food packaging is an alternative to plastic food packaging made from bagasse – pulped sugarcane-fibre, a waste product from the sugar industry. The design is geared to express its natural origins and circularity, from the subtly flecked, neutral colour and matte finish to the embossed logomark featuring a plant within a gradated circle.

Biomaterials are not a magic bullet to the multi-faceted nature crisis

However, for BioCane to be grease repellant (so it doesn't fall apart before you've consumed the contents) it needs an oleophobic coating, unlike plastic packaging. BioCane uses a polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) for this coating. PFAS are termed "forever chemicals" due to their damaging long-term persistence and accumulation in the environment – not to mention our own bodies.

BioPak, which produces BioCane, transparently publishes information about this on its website, highlighting it as an industry-wide problem. The company also includes a timely pledge to phase out PFAS-containing packaging by June 2024, which happens to coincide with a move to phase out PFAS by the Environmental Protection Agency in the US.

Not all manufacturers are as responsible; it's common to find unlisted additives – or perhaps a fossil-based lamination to improve a material's durability – under a headline claim of biological origins.

Bioplastic is another material experiencing significant growth, partly driven by high oil prices making fossil-fuel-derived plastic less competitive. Most bioplastic is made from ethanol, commonly sourced from corn, wheat or sugarcane. Sugarcane, for example, is planted in monocultures in tropical and sub-tropical countries like Brazil. The sugar is extracted, fermented and distilled to produce precursor chemicals for bioplastics.

But to assess the environmental value of using this bioplastic, we need to know about how the crops are managed – for example, the pesticides and synthetic fertilisers used to increase crop yield, the land-clearance practices, and the effect on food prices if the bioplastic became widely adopted. At the end of the product's life, specialised infrastructure for disposal will need to be in place, further complicating the picture.

Biodegradable bioplastic would seem to offer a solution to the worst ravages of plastic – the alarming buildup of microplastic pollution across the world. How much better if the material could be absorbed back into the environment?

Biodegradable doesn't mean a material will break down in the environment over useful timescales

The market opportunity for biodegradable plastics is alluring, and forecasts predict that they will account for the majority of the bioplastics market – 62 per cent, by 2028. This opportunity is attracting investment and also the potential for greenwashing as companies vie for a competitive advantage over others.

But biodegradable doesn't mean a material will break down in the environment over useful timescales. A 2022 UCL study of supposedly "home compostable" bioplastics revealed that 60 per cent did not fully degrade within the tested timespans – a finding that unravels the whole purpose for investing in compostable packaging.

Claims relating to bioplastics were at the crux of a recent legal case brought against US biotech firm Danimer Scientific Inc. The manufacturer of biodegradable products had claimed that its proprietary plastic material Nodax PHA is able to biodegrade not only in industrial composting facilities but in landfill and in the ocean.

Danimer's share prices rocketed, sparking an investigative report in the Wall Street Journal, which stated that "many claims about Nodax are exaggerated and misleading, according to several experts on biodegradable plastics". Danimer refutes this statement, but what came out in court was that the company performed biodegradability tests on Nodax in a powdered form, which doesn't relate to real-world product formats like bottles that have variable thickness.

The legal case was eventually dismissed, but nonetheless the alleged greenwashing spiked Danimer's share price, shaking investors' trust in the company and having knock-on effects for the wider industry.

Going forward, manufacturers will need to be transparent about what goes into their products. In the EU, legislation tackling greenwashing in product labelling will come into effect in 2026. The new law is a direct response to the rise in misleading claims that companies use.

When specifying a biomaterial, it's important to dig into its provenance

It comes after a study commissioned by the bloc found that 53 per cent of green claims on products and services are vague, misleading or unfounded, and 40 per cent have no supporting evidence. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority has published the​​ Green Claims Code – a six-point guide to help businesses ensure they are not unwittingly misleading customers.

These two initiatives highlight the importance of using the right language when promoting products and materials, and as the impact of the EU's legislation ripples through the industry, there will be a natural calibration to more transparency.

The takeaway for designers is that, as ever, the picture is complex. When specifying a biomaterial, it's important to dig into its provenance, as well as to look at the material use and disposal. The allure of the "bio" prefix from an ethical – and marketing – perspective may be strong, but must be taken along with some healthy scrutiny.

Sioban Imms is a colour, material and finish (CMF) and sustainability strategist with a background in design and manufacturing. She is co-founder of consulting agency Substance and a contributing editor at trend forecasters Stylus and WGSN.

The photo, of MarinaTex designed by Lucy Hughes, is courtesy of the University of Sussex.

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Ambient music pioneer Brian Eno is exhibiting an updated version of his illuminated record player composed of two eccentric Perspex circles at London's Paul Stolper Gallery.

Like its predecessor, released in 2021, Turntable II consists of a platter and base made of translucent acrylic, each fitted with LED lights that are programmed to change colour independently.

Thousands of tiny holes drilled into the plastic allow light to emanate from the record player, creating gradients where the two layers overlap.

The colour of the lights and the speed at which they change is programmed to change randomly, creating a nearly endless spectrum of "colourscapes".

"Several overlapping light cycles will keep producing different colour balances and blends – and different shadow formations that slowly evolve and never exactly repeat," Eno said.

"I've never ceased to be fascinated by the amazingly intricate, complex and unpredictable results produced by simple deterministic systems," he continued.

"Out of simplicity, complexity arises. That is for me the most incredible idea of evolution theory."

The turntable is distinguished from its forebearer by a matt-white tonearm and a circular base, which echoes the shape of the platter holding the vinyl record above.

Produced as a limited edition of 150, the record player is on display at Paul Stolper Gallery in London's Bloomsbury until 9 March 2024.

Eno, who is credited as one of the founding fathers of ambient music, first started experimenting with combining light and sound while attending art school in the late 1960s.

Since then, he has created a series of light box artworks for Paul Stolper and collaborated with British architect Asif Khan on the UK's energy-themed pavilion at the Astana Expo 2017 in Kazakhstan,

"I started using light and video because I wanted to make visual experiences that had some of the qualities of musical experiences – that's to say, that existed and changed in time," Eno explained.

"I wanted to make very slowly changing paintings, to blur the edges that separate those different forms."

The photography is Luke Walker.

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Driven by a desire for more mood-boosting daylight in the English winter, designers Nat Martin and Sean Hammett have invented an overhead light that promises to recreate the feeling of a sunny day.

The Sunday Light consists of a small but powerful LED suspended under a reflective panel. The panel is designed to diffuse light in a similar way to the Earth's atmosphere, dispersing it across a room.

Like a SAD lamp – the super-bright lights designed to fight seasonal affective disorder (SAD) – the Sunday Light promises to provide enough sun-like light to improve energy, mood and alertness.

Unlike a SAD lamp, however, Martin and Hammett say they designed the light to be pleasant to sit under, applying some creative engineering solutions to create a natural-looking, diffused light without any harshness.

The pair began working on the light when Martin found himself turned away from the US border after trying to spend too much time in Los Angeles.

Forced to return to his home in England and rent a windowless office space in London in the middle of winter, he called on his sometime collaborator Hammett to help him come up with a solution to the sunlight scarcity.

"I love sunshine," Martin told Dezeen. "Everyone to some extent needs sunlight. Some people are more affected by it than others but bright sunlight makes everyone feel better."

With this in mind, the pair didn't set out to address SAD sufferers and existing SAD lighting. Instead, they wanted to develop a light that could benefit everyone and recreate the feeling of a "beautiful sunny day".

Key to the design is what Martin describes as an "insanely bright" LED. At 10,000 lux, it delivers 300 times the light intensity of a typical home ceiling lamp.

This is where, according to Martin, he often has to ask people to give him the benefit of the doubt, as the idea of such a bright light can seem more repellent than attractive.

"The lighting world is very much centred around nice, dim, warm lights, which I think is what you want in the evening," he said. "And it's been done really well, but there's nothing for the daytime."

"The words bright and white light, both of those things have negative connotations but that's what sunshine is," he added.

"I think it's largely to do with the optics of how those lights work. The spectrum doesn't quite match the sun, so they have kind of a bluer tinge, which feels unpleasant and fluorescent-y. And it's partly to do with the surface area that the light emits from."

With the Sunday Light, Martin and Hammett have addressed both of these concerns.

First, the light has a high colour rendering index (CRI) value of 93, which means that even though it is cool in terms of colour temperature, it looks more natural and "pleasant", according to Martin.

Second, the light is indirect. The tiny, high-powered LED is contained within a metal arm and pointed up towards a diffusing reflector panel suspended from the ceiling.

The panel's finish – an acrylic paint containing titanium dioxide nanoparticles – further helps to scatter the light.

The effect is so much like what happens in the Earth's atmosphere that the panel appears sky blue when the light is on, with a white hotspot where the light hits it directly.

With the light off, the panel is actually a neutral, slightly pearlescent colour and visibly flat rather than domed.

This design also helps to conceal the necessary cooling system for the LED. Usually, a light this powerful would require a large heat sink that would look out of place in a home, office or hospitality setting.

Instead, Martin and Hammett came up with a smaller water cooling system, with water flowing down one pipe on the metal arm and up the other to reach a radiator above the reflector, which moves the heat into the ambient air.

"The design evolved from just trying to make something that fits in everyone's room," said Martin. "It fits in any house and it's not too heavy either at 25 kilograms."

This distinguishes the Sunday Light from the likes of artificial skylights, such as those of Finnish brand Light Cognitive, which require architectural interventions.

Martin and Hammett have started their own company to sell the Sunday Light and will begin by targeting the UK and Scandinavian markets. To fight the bias against bright lights, they intend to display the product at showrooms so people can see its effect for themselves.

Both designers emerged from the Innovation Design Engineering masters course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.

Martin's final-year project as part of the degree was an augmented reality controller ring, which he went on to develop under the name Litho before selling the technology.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers and fashion brand Ministry of Supply have produced a "4D-knit dress", using heat-activated yarn that allows its shape and fit to be altered in an instant.

The project builds on the idea of 3D knitting, where textiles are knitted as three-dimensional shapes rather than flat sheets that have to be cut and sewn together to make a garment.

The fourth dimension represents time, as the 4D Knit Dress is knitted in a basic tube shape but can later have its form altered through the application of heat via a programmed robot arm.

This might mean changing its shape to anything from a form-fitting sheath dress to a voluminous bubble dress, or it can mean making small tucks to produce a fit perfectly customised to an individual's body. The process can even create details like ruffles or ruching.

Researchers from the Self-Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is behind the project, say the 4D-Knit Dress is a more sustainable alternative to traditionally produced clothing that cuts down on the waste from both manufacturing and excess stock.

Self-Assembly Lab founder and co-director Skylar Tibbits told Dezeen that producing items of clothing in too many sizes and too many styles was both costly and unsustainable for the fashion industry.

"By having one dress that can be customised for fit and style, it can be perfectly tailored to the individual while being more sustainable and adaptable to changes in season, style or inventory," he said.

The heat-activated yarn was developed by the Self-Assembly Lab and is made of nylon. It is mixed with a soft yarn that blends viscose and polyester in the weave of the dress.

As well as the yarn, the knit structure is key to the dress, guiding the way the fabric transforms.

"The material responds to temperature and shrinks while the knitted structure guides the direction of the transformation and allows for different zones or behaviours across the garment," said Tibbits.

"We have worked for a number of years to develop precise directional control of the textile transformation as well as specific amounts of transformation at different temperature ranges."

To activate the alterations, the Self-Assembly Lab and Ministry of Supply use a six-axis robot – the same kind used on factory floors for welding or assembly.

In Ministry of Supply's Boston flagship store, where the dress was on display, the robot arm moved on a programmed route around a mannequin, echoing the movements of a tailor adding pins and tucks.

The fashion brand has an ongoing partnership with the Self-Assembly Lab, which has run for nearly a decade, with the researchers focusing on the technical aspects of the project and Ministry of Supply leading on design and in-store strategy.

After developing the fibre, yarn, knitting and activation processes together, the collaborators applied the technology during the pandemic to rapidly produce face masks personalised to fit individual faces.

The 4D-Knit Dress was made in a limited product run of prototypes and displayed at the Ministry of Supply store.

The Self-Assembly Lab says the dress maintains its softness, stretch and resilience after heating, and that the production process is efficient and scalable. The dress is also machine washable on cold.

Ministry of Supply has begun to scale up the process of manufacturing the 4D-Knit Dress with its industrial knitting partners so it can be sent to more stores.

"In light of the supply-chain challenges of the past several years, we're finding an increased need to do 'late-stage differentiation' in our inventory," said Ministry of Supply co-founder and president Gihan Amarasiriwardena.

"That allows us and other brands to adapt to demand, changes in size curves and seasonality – which 4D Knitting allows."

Ministry of Supply was founded by three MIT students in 2012 to apply new technologies to fashion. Its previous designs have included a self-heating smart jacket.

The Self-Assembly Lab has previously developed innovations such as Rapid Liquid Printing – a way of manufacturing furniture in minutes by extruding material into gel – and a material called Active Auxetic, which tightens in cold weather to keep in warmth.

Project credits

MIT Self-Assembly Lab
Researchers: Sasha Mckinlay, Danny Griffin, Lavender Tessmer, Natalie Pearl, Sofia Chen, Susan Williams, Agnes Parker
Co-directors: Jared Laucks, Skylar Tibbits

Ministry of Supply

Design director: Jarlath Mellett
Design and development manager: Alessandra Vasi
Senior manufacturing engineer: Ryan Connary
Co-founder and president: Gihan Amarasiriwardena

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The latest edition of our Dezeen Debate newsletter features the Polestar 4 electric car, which doesn't have a rear window. Subscribe to Dezeen Debate now.

Swedish car manufacturer Polestar has revealed the Polestar 4, the world's first mass-market car without a rear window. The vehicle is a five-door electric SUV coupé that is now available to buy in Europe and Australia, following its release in China last year.

Readers had varied reactions to the vehicle. One joked about its rear-windowless design, saying, "there's no looking back from here," while another praised its "forward-looking design".

Other stories in this week's newsletter that fired up the comments section included the latest Maggie's Centre designed by Studio Libeskind, an infinity pool in Lake Como by Herzog & de Meuron and Zaha Hadid Architects' plans for 100 hydrogen refuelling stations in Italian marinas.

Dezeen Debate

Dezeen Debate is sent every Thursday and features a selection of the best reader comments and most talked-about stories. Read the latest edition of Dezeen Debate or subscribe here.

You can also subscribe to our other newsletters; Dezeen Agenda is sent every Tuesday containing a selection of the most important news highlights from the week, Dezeen Daily is our daily bulletin that contains every story published in the preceding 24 hours and Dezeen In Depth is sent on the last Friday of every month and delves deeper into the major stories shaping architecture and design.

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Plastic-free, fake fur made from nettle, hemp and flax fibres envelops these special edition bags that Danish fashion brand Ganni has unveiled at Copenhagen Fashion Week.

The one offs are a riff on Ganni's classic Bou bag made in collaboration with materials company BioFluff, which claims to have developed the "world's first plant-based fur".

Unlike existing faux furs, the shaggy textile contains zero plastics or petrochemicals, according to the manufacturer. Instead, its hairy fibres are extracted from plants and agricultural waste using special enzymes that are also plant-derived.

"We source the fibres in Europe and create the fur in Italy using our patented process," BioFluff co-founder and CEO Martin Stübler told Dezeen.

"We use a combination of existing textile technologies, science and the savoir-faire of the Italian fur industry," he continued.

"The fur 'hairs' are genuine plant fibres, meaning we do not process the fibres into yarn, which avoids the energy-intensive yarn spinning process."

Although a full lifecycle analysis is still in the works, early estimates suggest that the plant-based fur produces 50 per cent fewer emissions than its plastic counterparts while cutting out the issue of microplastics.

BioFluff also estimates that the material produces up to 90 per cent fewer emissions than real animal fur by eliminating the need to raise and feed livestock and the extensive processing required for pelts.

For the plant fibres, BioFluff uses a mixture of nettle, hemp and flax, half of which the company says can be sourced from agricultural waste streams.

The natural brown colour of the resulting textile can be bleached to become off-white or dyed using mineral pigments – pink and black in the case of the Ganni bags, which were finished with a braided handle made of recycled leather.

BioFluff's fur would break down in an industrial composting facility after "several weeks", Stübler estimates, although no compostability study has been completed so far.

Marrying Stübler's background in biochemistry with the textile know-how of his co-founder Steven Usdan, the company has been able to create a range of different finishes – some resembling fur while others are closer to fleece or shearling.

"We have a different range of products, some more similar to animal fur while others have a unique aesthetic and feel, and we are constantly developing and improving," said Stübler.

"We achieved this through iterations and feedback from brands like Ganni."

This year marked the first time in 10 years that Ganni has not shown at Copenhagen Fashion Week.

Instead, the brand staged the Future, Talent, Fabrics exhibitions to spotlight emerging Nordic designers and innovative materials the company is exploring as part of its Fabrics of the Future platform.

Alongside the BioFluff bag, Ganni showcased several bags made from Celium – a leather alternative grown by bacteria, which the brand has previously used to make a biker jacket.

On the path to halving its emissions by 2027, Ganni has experimented with a range of different materials including a yarn made from banana waste that was turned into a three-piece tracksuit.

However, climate experts are increasingly warning that the fashion industry's investments in more sustainable materials are not enough to offset the climate impact caused by its overproduction.

Future, Talent, Fabrics was on show as part of Copenhagen Fashion Week from 31 January to 2 February 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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American architecture studio NBBJ has created a series of interactive media displays in a California children's hospital to ease young patients' anxiety.

Designed by the NBBJ's New York experience design studio ESI Design, the installations consist of screens that display a native California landscape where children can create animal characters to release into the wild.

It is located at Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital (LLUCH) outside of Los Angeles. The team wanted to install a feature to quell the nerves of young patients entering the hospital for surgeries and other appointments.

The studio created an interactive digital forest display called Loma Land that spans five screens built into a lobby wall, and is accompanied by an audio soundtrack.

"Loma Land will greet young patients with an idyllic forest of animated creatures, rustling plants and the gentle sounds of flowing water," said the team.

Along the digital experience, which spans 415 square feet (38 square metres), children select an animal companion, customise its fur, add accessories, and then release it into the "wild".

Children select and customize their animals just outside security gates, within three oval-shaped touchscreens. There, they pick animals native to the surrounding California landscape including a fox, bear, deer and raccoon.

Moving along the screens, they can select from a variety of brightly-coloured fur and add accessories, including an acorn hat, leaf mask and grass top hat.

Once the animal is made, children can interact with it one-on-one via a fourth screen, or pass through the security gates, where the creature is released into a larger landscape that's displayed on a 60-foot-wide (18-metre) screen.

As children and parents walk past the landscape and further into the hospital, the animal can be seen interacting with creatures created by other children and roaming around a forested environment.

"When it came time to design Loma Land, the greatest challenge became the fact there is truly nothing quite like it," said the team.

"So, the team looked for inspiration from libraries, children's museums and games. These cultural media experiences motivated the team to incorporate elements such as character play, active and passive disruption, and collaborative composition."

The team surveyed a group of children and their families to select the digital setting for the installation, with the majority preferring a natural environment.

ESI Design incorporated native trees and shrubs into the environment to provide further familiarity and comfort.

The team believes the Loma Land concept could be incorporated into other hospitals and expanded across LLUCH to meet future needs.

"While this innovation is truly remarkable, what makes it especially relevant to today's healthcare system is the fact it can be easily replicated by any hospital that has the vision to transform the patient experience from one of dread into one of delight," said the team.

They also noted additional displays could include different environments and plush toys of the animals could be incorporated into gift shops for an "offline" experience as an extension of the concept.

The team also prioritized the use of projectors when possible, instead of LED screens, in the interest of making the displays easier to clean as the display wall simply needs to be sanitized.

NBBJ recently collaborated with Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on a LA Playground and created a pediatric clinic in Seattle with "no blank walls".

The photography is by Sean Airhart

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Swedish automaker Polestar has begun taking orders for the Polestar 4 – the world's first mass-market car to have no rear window.

The Polestar 4 is a five-door electric SUV coupé that has now gone on sale in Europe and Australia following on from its Chinese launch last year.

The omitted rear window is a design feature adapted from the brand's 2020 Polestar Precept concept vehicle and was made possible by technological advances that mean a roof-mounted rear camera now provides a more reliable picture than a rear-view mirror in a coupé.

"Normally, you need to provide for a good rear view with the inner rear-view mirror," said Polestar's head of design Maximilian Missoni.

"We have realised that the technology has reached a point where you can switch out the physical mirror with a digital display and an HD camera."

Eliminating the rear window opened up a number of design opportunities, according to Missoni.

It allowed Polestar to create a particularly smooth roof line on the exterior of the car and stretch the glass roof beyond the occupants' heads while making room for "extremely spacious" reclining rear seats on the interior.

Polestar says this allows for "a new kind of immersive rear occupant experience" where passengers are "cocooned" away from the world and able to take calls, enjoy the entertainment system or bask in ambient lighting with settings inspired by the planets of the solar system.

There is still a rear-view mirror that the driver can use to view the rear passengers, they just need to deactivate the real-time feed from the camera.

Polestar is positioning its fourth vehicle in between the Polestar 2 and Polestar 3 in terms of size and price, and says it is the company's fastest production car, capable of accelerating from 1 to 100 kilometres per hour in 3.8 seconds.

Another feature implemented from the Polestar Precept concept car is the "dual blade" design of the front lights, a new signature for the brand.

In the interior, Polestar has based the design around the theme of "soft tech" and looked to fashion and sportswear as inspiration.

A newly developed 3D knit textile made of recycled PET covers the dashboard, created together with the Swedish School of Textiles and meant to minimise waste. Alternatively, the dashboard can be customised in traced leather.

In other areas of the interior, the company says it has started to implement a mono-material approach to make recycling easier.

The sustainable initiatives are in line with Polestar's efforts to produce a climate-neutral car, which it aims to do by 2030 but has admitted is a "moonshot goal".

The company says the Polestar 4 is its lowest-carbon car to date, with a cradle-to-gate footprint of 19.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) for the single-motor model.

A comparable petrol car would still generate slightly lower emissions up until leaving the factory gate, according to Polestar's own modelling.

But Polestar's production-related emissions are on a downward trend as it has started using low-carbon aluminium from a factory run on hydroelectricity and getting part of its energy from solar panels on the roof of the Geely factory in Hangzhou Bay, where the Polestar 4 is manufactured.

The vehicle is available in two variants: one with a single motor and one with a dual motor. In the latter version, two independent motors control the front and rear wheels for enhanced power and traction.

Both variants have a 100 kilowatt-hour battery, giving a range target of between 580 to 610 kilometres.

Other cars with a camera instead of a rear window include the Aston Martin DBS GT Zagato and Ferrari 812 Competizione, but neither of these is a mass market car.

Production on cars for Europe, the UK and Australia is planned to start in mid-2024 with deliveries being made from August. The first deliveries of Chinese orders were made at the end of 2023.

Polestar is a subsidiary of car brands Volvo and Geely and a competitor to Tesla. Its most recent concept car was the O2 roadster, which comes with its own personal drone.

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Technology company Apple has released its Vision Pro headset, a wearable device that allows users to project visual applications in a 3D environment controlled by eye and hand movements.

The Vision Pro is a mixed-reality headset with an alloy frame and fabric head strap that holds a "spatial computer" over the eyes of the user to project a computer interface.

A piece of laminated glass bends over the front of the headset and holds a variety of sensors and cameras that project the exterior surroundings into the lenses within the headset so that users can see what's going on around them.

Computing systems within the headset simultaneously project a digital user interface into the room, so that applications such as web browsers appear to be floating three-dimensionally wherever the user looks.

This digital interface is controlled by eye movements. The eye works as a "cursor" selecting the various apps and screens and the hand, without any hardware, can make minor movements to select options, change screens, arrange multiple windows in the spatial array and expand or contract the various screens.

The interface also includes a keyboard function that appears before users. They can type directly onto this keyboard with auditory settings to make the haptic elements feel more physical.

Voice commands can also be used and the headset is equipped with spatial-audio speakers. It can be directly connected to a power source or a portable external battery that allows for two hours of use.

Its frame has a dial on the upper right that acts as a power and "home" button and controls the "blend" between the virtual and actual physical environment projected into the headset.

When turned up, the virtual element can blot out the actual environment, completely immersing the user in a 360-degree digital environment, using visual assets filmed with spatial image-capture technology.

Apple's iPhone 15 Pro models can directly capture this spatial video, which can be uploaded to the Vision Pro, allowing users to send each other manually captured 3D environments.

Hundreds of apps have already been built for the interface, on top of the apps available with past Apple devices, with more from third-party developers expected as the device gains more users.

Current hardware, such as the MacBook laptop can also be used with the device, allowing users to integrate physical keyboards with the interface.

Integration with the physical environment was an important element of the interface. When the virtual dial is turned all the way up, spatial awareness sensors will indicate to a user when someone interacts with them in the physical environment.

When this happens, people outside appear through the veil of the interface.

The laminated glass fronting of the device also allows for certain functions that indicate the state of awareness of the user.

When in full use, the screen will project a colourful pattern and when the person needs to speak, their eyes can be captured by internal cameras that are then projected onto the laminated screen in real-time.

When the design was announced in June 2023, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the device would usher in a "new era for computing".

Hundreds of people gathered at Apple's 5th Avenue retail store in Manhattan last Friday for the release of Apple's marquee headset. Cook was present for the launch and press and potential customers were ushered into the subterranean, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson-designed store.

Because the device requires some customisation to fit on the face of the user, a sales representative was required to walk each person through the interface, and Apple installed a series of special benches to facilitate this process.

Other mixed-reality headsets include a device by Finnish technology company Varjo, which was announced in 2018.

The photography is courtesy of Apple.

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British studio Zaha Hadid Architects is creating 100 refuelling stations in Italian marinas for energy company NatPower as the "world's first green hydrogen refuelling infrastructure".

Designed to be used by recreational boats, the refuelling stations by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) will supply green hydrogen – a type of hydrogen produced using renewable energy.

The first charging station is set to be installed this summer, with 100 planned to be built in 25 Italian marinas and ports by 2030 funded by a €100 million investment led by NatPower H, which is part of energy company NatPower.

The charging stations form part of an effort to encourage the adoption of boats powered by green hydrogen for short trips. Hydrogen can be used to generate electrical power in a fuel cell, emitting only water vapour and warm air – unlike polluting combustion engines.

"Installing the infrastructure to deliver green hydrogen, NatPower H aims to create a network of sustainable energy hubs in all major Italian marinas and establish ideal conditions to facilitate the ongoing development and use of hydrogen-powered vessels," the studio said.

According to the studio, the 100 stations could eliminate approximately 45,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from the area's recreational boats each year.

The stations will each be divided into eight curved bays and made from 3D-printed concrete blocks with a layered composition designed to echo geometrics found in marine life.

According to the studio, the 50-square-metre stations will be fully recyclable and built from dry-assembled sections to minimise construction waste.

"Built with low-carbon concrete, the structural strength of ZHA's hydrogen refuelling stations is generated through geometry rather than an increased use of materials," Zaha Hadid Architects director Filippo Innocenti said.

"Integrating the latest innovations in construction techniques with the historic engineering developed throughout the Mediterranean by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago, the stations use advanced circular building technologies, reflecting NatPower H's commitment to an ecologically responsible future."

The design follows research by ZHA's Computation and Design Research Group (ZHA Code) on masonry structures, 3D-printed concrete and sustainable digital concrete construction developed alongside Block Research Group and Incremental3D.

Other projects exploring hydrogen refuelling technologies include a mirror-polished stainless-steel refuelling station by French designer Philippe Starck designed to give a futuristic feel.

The renders are by Tecma Solutions.

Project credits:

Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects
Principal: Patrik Schumacher
Project director: Filippo Innocenti
Project associate: Luciano Letteriello
ZHA code: Tommaso Casucci, Heba Eiz, Oliver Moldow, Taeyoon Kim, Binru Wang, Jianfei Chu, Vishu Bhooshan, Henry Louth, Shajay Bhooshan
ZHA videography: Henry Virgin
Strategic positioning: Baglietto
American's cup partnership: BlueGame
Hydrogen technology consultant: BluEnergy Revolution
Project management & engineering advisor: Fichtner Media & PR: Havas
Hydrogen and technology partner: Linde
Legal consultant partner: Studio Maresca Safety Advisor: Sige
Communication and images: Tecma Solutions

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Global architecture studio Gensler has designed an apartment complex with circular buildings and integrated electric-vehicle parking towers in Ontario.

Designed in collaboration with design agency Studio Dror and located outside of Toronto, the Electric Vehicle Enclave (EVE) Park development aims to integrate green technologies into a community-focused residential development.

"The EVE Park homes are designed within circular clusters with stepped rooflines that create dynamic spatial experiences between buildings and allow roof-mounted solar panels to optimally harness energy," said Gensler principal Oliver Schaper.

"The circular clusters promote community within a shared courtyard and offer small private outdoor spaces on the outside embedded in a park-like setting, creating a residential experience centred on connection to the outdoors."

Renderings of the design show four circular apartment buildings with cascading roofs topped with solar panels, clustered together on an L-shaped site.

Autonomous EV parking garages mark the highest point of the curved roofline and descend along one side of the buildings, covered in plants.

The garages will be integrated to reduce land occupancy of vehicles, including driveways and individual car garages, while providing more green space for the apartment's occupants.

"At the tallest end of the building, a vertically stacked garage houses electric vehicles that will be shared amongst dwellers, reducing the community's carbon footprint and emissions," said Gensler.

Other design strategies, such as energy-efficient appliances and Energy Recovery Ventilators (ERVs) for air filtration, will help the complex reach net-positive energy consumption, according to the firm.

The buildings will host 84 households configured as one, two and three-bedroom condos.

Interiors will have double-height living space with multiple picture windows and large fireplaces.

The landscaping and paths will surround the apartment buildings, with further plantings placed at their centres and a pond sits at one corner.

"EVE Park is forward-thinking in its program conceptualization and demonstrates how the integration of nature and technology can usher in the community of the future," said the firm.

It is currently under construction, according to Gensler.

Recently, legislation passed in England requires all new buildings to contain electric vehicle charging stations, while Woods Bagot designed a concept where charging stations could double as drive-in movie theatres in Los Angeles.

Images are courtesy of EVE Park/Gensler/Dror.

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Two British materials companies, Sages and Osmose, have collaborated to dye sheets of mycelium with natural food waste, mimicking the appearance of tanned leather and suggesting a colourful future for the biomaterial.

Osmose is a company making a leather alternative from mycelium – the fibrous underground root network of mushrooms – while Sages makes natural dyes from food waste such as avocado pits, blueberries, red cabbages and onion skins, which are normally applied to textiles.

The two believe they've achieved a world first with their collaboration, combining two emerging areas of sustainable material development to colour mycelium without resorting to petroleum-based synthetic dyes, thereby keeping the product non-toxic and able to biodegrade safely in soil.

"There are lots of different types of vegan leather alternatives to traditional leather but the majority of them use either synthetic colourations or they use plasticisers, so they're non-biodegradable," said Sages CEO Emily Taylor.

"We wanted to explore an option where we could have a fully biodegradable leather that has also been coloured in a biodegradable and sustainable manner," she continued.

Companies that prioritise biodegradability have offered mycelium in its natural shades of white and brown or black, which Osmose CEO Aurelie Fontan says is much easier to achieve naturally.

"I think the challenge for mycelium leather was that the offering just wasn't there in terms of aesthetic," she said. "When you're presenting for brands and you're like 'we can only do brown', it's a little bit boring for them."

"The colour sector is somewhere where you can develop your USP, essentially, which is why working with Sages is so interesting," Fontan added.

Osmose and Sages have created tan-coloured mycelium sheets using avocado waste, which Sages sources from an importer and guacamole factory in Milton Keynes, where tens of tonnes of leftover pits and skins are produced each week.

It was a new area for both companies, as the food waste dye takes differently to mycelium leather than it does to the usually cellulose-based textiles that Sages has worked with.

The duo collaborated with materials science researchers at the UK's Cranfield University on the project, for which the researchers focused on how to transfer and fix the dye to the material using "green chemistry" – an area of chemistry that aims to cut out hazardous substances.

In this case, the researchers sought to replace the formic acid and fluorinated acids that are often used in tanning to dissolve the polymers of the leather so it can be infused with dye. Instead, the team developed a method, which they say is significantly less toxic.

After working with Cranfield University, Sages and Osmose expanded the experiment and trialled other waste streams such as blueberries and onion skins to see what colours they could get, producing mycelium swatches in shades of violet and bordeaux.

Taylor and Fontan say they are trying to develop a process for mycelium that is akin to leather tanning, where both colour and durability properties are added in one or two steps. Their equivalent, they say, would be to dye and waterproof the material at the same time.

Osmose's focus now is on developing a waterproof coating for their mycelium that, like the dye, is bio-based, non-toxic and able to biodegrade safely in soil. This is notoriously a challenge for plant-based leather alternatives, which almost always rely on a protective synthetic coating.

"It's really hard to design a solution that fits all materials, which is basically what everyone is struggling with," said Fontan. "Someone might have pineapple leather and they have their own coating but it doesn't mean it's going to work on mushroom and so on."

Unlike some companies, however, Osmose says it does not want to bring a product with a non-biodegradable coating to market.

"If you're doing a composite, it will not biodegrade at the end of life, which is compromising all the good work that you've been doing before that step," Fontan said.

Mycelium is one of the most popular emerging leather alternatives. It has already appeared in luxury goods such as a bag by Hermes, clothing by Stella McCartney and trainers by Adidas.

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Technology company Neuralink has implanted its brain-computer interface Telepathy in a human patient for the first time as part of a clinical trial, founder Elon Musk has announced.

The brain chip, which Musk has dubbed Telepathy, was designed to allow users to control a phone or computer using only their thoughts.

The first subject, who was fitted with the brain-computer interface (BCI) on Sunday, is recovering well, Musk announced on X (formerly Twitter).

The trial was greenlit by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last May and began recruiting for in-human clinical trials in September. It will focus on people with quadriplegia – the paralysis of all four limbs – and other types of limited mobility.

"Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs," Musk wrote on X. "Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal."

The Prime Study, which stands for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, was designed to evaluate the safety of both the Telepathy implant and the accompanying surgical robot.

Neuralink designed the robot to place the implant's "ultra-fine and flexible threads" – each thinner than a human hair and together housing more than 1,000 electrodes – in the part of the brain that controls a person's intent to move.

The aim is for the implant to record these signals and wirelessly transmit them to an app that is able to decode the wearer's movement intention, allowing them to browse the web or play games without having to move physically.

The study will now test whether the device functions as intended, and Musk has claimed that initial results show "promising neuron spike detection".

Musk originally unveiled plans for the brain implant in 2019 and announced that the company had begun testing on pigs the following year.

Lawmakers in the US have called for an investigation into whether Musk allegedly misled investors about the safety of the implant after veterinary records from Neuralink trials in monkeys indicated that some animals suffered "debilitating health effects".

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Space agency NASA and aerospace company Lockheed Martin have presented their experimental X-59 supersonic jet, which has a form designed to reduce the loudness of a sonic boom.

According to the companies, the experimental aircraft was "designed to quiet the sonic boom" and marks a "significant milestone" in the decades-long research project aimed at resolving noise challenges associated with supersonic flight.

The aircraft, which has a cruising speed of 925 miles per hour, was presented for the first time last month by Lockheed Martin's advanced development division Skunk Works.

"Lockheed Martin Skunk Works rolled out the X-59, a unique experimental aircraft designed to quiet the sonic boom, at a ceremony in Palmdale, California," said the company.

"The ceremony marked a significant milestone in Lockheed Martin and NASA's decades-long journey to solve one of the most persistent challenges of supersonic flight – the sonic boom."

The 30.3-metre-long (99.7-feet) aircraft was designed to reduce the shockwaves and noise created when the sound barrier is broken – known as a sonic boom.

NASA and Lockheed Martin made the X-59 with a long tapered nose designed to separate the shock waves that cause sonic booms, thereby reducing the potential sound and damage risks associated with other supersonic aircraft models.

This design means that the cockpit, which has no front-facing windows and instead utilises high-resolution cameras that feed 4K monitors, is located almost halfway down the length of the aircraft.

The X-59 will now undergo a series of ground tests before completing its first flight later this year followed by acoustic tests.

The companies hope that the research and technologies developed for the X-59 may be used to inform future designs of commercial supersonic aircraft.

"[The acoustic phase] will include flights over populated areas to provide US and international regulators with statistically valid data required to help approve new rules that could allow quiet commercial supersonic flight over land," the companies stated.

"This would cut commercial flight times to half of what they are today, transforming travel for people around the world."

"We're thrilled to take on this challenge alongside NASA, whose quiet supersonic technology mission will have lasting, transformational impacts for people around the world," said Lockheed Martin Skunk Works vice president John Clark.

"This project is just one example of the broader ingenuity of our industry as we continually strive to push the envelope of what's possible."

The X-59 is the latest supersonic aircraft – an aircraft that can travel above Mach 1.

The first supersonic aircraft was the rocket-powered Bell X-1, flown in 1947. Later in 1973, manufacturers in Britain and France developed the Concorde, the first supersonic commercial plane. Travelling at Mach 2.04, the Concorde became a regular commercial route from 1976 before its service was stopped in 2003.

Other projects recently completed by NASA include using AI to design hardware that is three times better in performance and funding ICON to develop lunar 3D-printing construction technology.

Lockheed Martin also previously partnered with tyre-maker Goodyear and car manufacturer General Motors to design airless tyres for NASA's next lunar landing.

The photography is by Garry Tice and Michael Jackson. 

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The world's first full-scale timber wind turbine has started turning in Sweden, with a tower built by wood technology company Modvion.

The 105-metre-tall tower, located in the region of Skara, is Modvion's first commercial wind turbine tower, and follows on from a smaller 30-metre-high demonstration project the company completed in 2020.

While its rotor blades and generator hub are made of conventional materials, the tower is made of laminated veneer lumber (LVL), a type of engineered wood made of thin veneer strips glued together and often used for beams and load-bearing building structures.

The company says that this type of wood is not only strong enough to withstand the forces of a turning turbine, it is much more environmentally sustainable to build with than the currently used steel.

While wind power plays an important role in providing the world with green renewable energy, there are still ample carbon emissions created during their construction — in part because of the steel towers.

Modvion describes its wood towers as reducing the carbon emissions from wind turbine construction by over 100 per cent, due to the combination of a less emissions-heavy production process and the carbon storage provided by trees.

"Our towers, just in the production of them, they emit 90 per cent less than a steel tower that will do carry the same work," Modvion chief financial officer Maria-Lina Hedlund told Dezeen. "And then if you add the carbon sequestration, then you actually end up with a minus — so a carbon sink. This is great if we want to reach net zero energy production, and we need to."

Hedlund, who is also an engineer, describes LVL as having a construction "similar to carbon fibre", with strips of veneer just three millimetres thick sandwiched and glued together, giving it a high strength-to-weight ratio.

This lightness is a benefit, reducing the amount of material needed overall. With a heavy material, there is a "bad design spiral", says Hedlund, as the weight of the tower itself adds to the load that it needs to carry.

And while some LVL has all their veneer strips facing in the same direction, Modvion uses its "own recipe" specifying the directions of the fibres, improving the material's performance even more.

The production process involves timber boards being made to order in a standard LVL plant and then delivered to Modvion's factory. There, they are glued together into larger modules and bent into a rounded form in a step called lamination, and then very precisely machined to fine-tune the shape.

"In the wood industry, you usually see centimetre tolerances, while we are in the sub-millimetre scale," said Hedlund.

The modular nature of LVL construction addresses another problem Modvion has observed with steel: that with turbines getting ever bigger to give more power, it's becoming impossible to transport steel towers to site.

They are built as essentially large cylinders and transported by truck, but the base diameter desired for the tallest towers is getting to be taller than some bridges and roads can allow.

"We're now reaching a point where they will not get through anymore," said Hedlund. "So we will see a transition in the wind power industry to modular construction, because this is the way to get them there. And one of the big advantages of building in the material we do is that it's naturally built modular."

While steel could also be built modular, it would require bolts rather than glue to join it together on site, which Hedlund says is a disadvantage.

"Bolts are not very nice when you have so much dynamic loading, because it will loosen over time," she said. "So first of all, you have to have to put them in place which is a lot of work, and then you have to also service them over the lifetime."

The Skara turbine has a capacity of two megawatts, which represents the maximum power output the turbine can achieve under ideal conditions. This is a bit lower than the average capacity for new turbines built in Europe.

On the outside, the tower has a thick white coating that makes it look similar to steel, and it's rotor blades and generator hub, which are not supplied by Modvion, are made of conventional materials like fibreglass. This may change in the future, however, with another company, Voodin Blades, working on the technology for wooden blades.

Modvion was founded in 2016 by university peers David Olivegren and Otto Lundman. While its current focus is wind turbines, it is dedicated to wooden technology more broadly, and Hedlund told Dezeen that the team believes it has "the world's strongest joint for timber construction", which could also be put to other uses.

Another recent milestone for wind power came in the form of a wind-powered cargo ship, which had been retrofitted with two 37.5-metre-tall sails.

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British architecture practice Studio Bark has worked with students from the University of East London to devise a roof-supporting column with otherwise unusable timber at a site within ancient English woodland.

Named Spindles, the project, which borrowed techniques from local chair making traditions, involved using small pieces of shaped wood to make a roof-supporting column.

The most important aspect of the project, Studio Bark architect Ella Thorns explained to Dezeen, was the approach the practice took to thinking about timber and responding to the particular ecological conditions of a site.

Spindles began when the studio was hired to build a family home on a site within an overgrown plantation on ancient woodland in Buckinghamshire in the southeast of England.

"We immediately realised that the woodland was in quite bad condition to someone who knows what that looks like – which I didn't at first, but you can tell very quickly from looking at the floor of a forest, and there was just no growth happening at all," said Thorns. "It was very dead."

"We were there in midsummer. You should have this flourishing understory of shrubs and plants and things and there was just nothing, and a lot of the trees are very tall and spindly."

Working with advice from timber and forestry consultancy Evolving Forests, which developed a woodland management strategy for the site, they learned that they would need to cut down some trees – particularly dominant, non-native species – in order to rehabilitate the natural environment.

That posed the question of what to do with the felled trees. The studio wanted to use them, but these were not the sorts of trees that would be ordinarily accepted by sawmills and turned into construction timber – they were too small and irregularly shaped.

It got the studio thinking about timber and sustainability, and how although timber is usually assumed to be a green building material, it's not without its problems.

"In the UK, we don't have anywhere near enough timber that we need for current demand," said Thorns. "So we then questioned, can we use this timber, which is very much not the sort of stuff you buy on the shelf."

Usually, this "rejected" timber would be sold for firewood or left to decay, but that would release the carbon dioxide the tree had sequestered in its life, and Studio Bark wanted to avoid that outcome.

They found inspiration in the area's cultural heritage. Buckinghamshire is the historical centre of production for the Windsor chair, and the spindles of its backrest represent a very efficient way of using small pieces of wood.

This is because you can use a smaller piece of timber if you're going to cut a circular cross-section rather than a square one of the overall same area and strength. This is "an old technique", said Thorns, but one that opens up a lot of opportunities to use smaller trees.

The round wood lengths complement the tree's natural growth pattern where the rings grow around any defects, she explained, and result in less wastage. The spindle shape — fatter in the middle, thinner in the ends — is also useful.

"If you were to draw a force diagram, you'd need more material in the middle, so naturally it's a win-win," she said.

The studio worked with craftsperson and tree surgeon Ben Harris as well as masters students from the University of East London's School of Architecture, who were on an annual "construction fortnight", to cut wood using an electric lathe on site.

They then worked with structural engineer Structure Workshop to develop a plan for how to use the small sections of wood in an architectural context, envisioning them as pieces of a larger column. They also built a 1:3 structural model of a possible spindle application, consisting of columns of wood connected by a glulam beam, with spindles emerging from the beam to support a roof.

Thorns said that the impact of the Spindles project was "wider than the actual design" and more about a "methodology of thinking" around timber that considered "not just the carbon metric but also the biodiversity and social metric".

"We need to look to alternative sources and design buildings that make timber go a lot further," she said. "The Spindles project does just this, increasing the conversion rate of tree to useable timber and working with homegrown timber that is usually overlooked."

Studio Bark has not yet designed the farmhouse for the site but intends to use its trees for both structural and cladding elements such as shingles or shakes. It also hopes to make bespoke furniture with local students.

Studio Bark is a London-based practice that focuses on socially conscious projects. Its recent work has included a low-impact demountable timber house in rural England and a self-build modular construction system that has been used by Extinction Rebellion as "protest architecture".

Photography is by Millie Naylor and Shannon Childs.

Project credits

Concept, design and fabricators: Studio Bark
Craftsman and tree surgeon: Ben Harris, BM Timber
Structural engineer: Structure Workshop
Landscape architects: Studio 31
Timber and forestry consultant: Evolving Forests
Local historian: Robert Bishop, Kraftinwood, Chair Making Museum
Collaborator: Alan Chandler, co-director Sustainability Research Institute, UEL
Collaborator: Armor Gutierrez Rivas, senior lecturer in Architecture, UEL
Collaborator: Daryl Brown, UEL Timber Workshop
Collaborator: David Morgan, UEL Timber Workshop
UEL Master of Architecture Students team: Zakaria Arif, Bahar Bozygit, Talha Jariwala, Junaid Nohur, Alex Saw, Kelly Yamba, Bhairavi Zende

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The latest edition of our Dezeen Debate newsletter features a keyboard attachment for iPhones designed by Clicks Technology. Subscribe to Dezeen Debate now.

US start-up Clicks Technology has revealed the Clicks Creator Keyboard, a mechanical keyboard attachment for iPhones. The keyboard, which was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show, draws inspiration from early smartphones such as the BlackBerry.

Readers were split – one thought the design was "well appreciated", with another adding that they've "honestly been waiting for this". Others disagreed, describing it as "a solution in search of a problem".

Other stories in this week's newsletter that fired up the comments section included the revelation of the world's longest cantilever ahead of its completion in Dubai, Issey Miyake's latest collection created in collaboration with Ronan Bouroullec and a red-brick home overlooking the River Thames by Fletcher Crane Architects.

Dezeen Debate

Dezeen Debate is sent every Thursday and features a selection of the best reader comments and most talked-about stories. Read the latest edition of Dezeen Debate or subscribe here.

You can also subscribe to our other newsletters; Dezeen Agenda is sent every Tuesday containing a selection of the most important news highlights from the week, Dezeen Daily is our daily bulletin that contains every story published in the preceding 24 hours and Dezeen In Depth is sent on the last Friday of every month and delves deeper into the major stories shaping architecture and design.

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Packaging designs aimed at boosting recycling rates and reducing the prevalence of single-use plastics are destined to fail unless they help to change people's behaviour, writes Matt Millington.

No one is particularly happy when they find out there's plastic waste on Mount Everest, or in the deep oceans, or in human blood. It's not controversial to say that we need to stop churning the stuff out and throwing it away.

One way for businesses to tackle single-use plastics is to design their packaging to be reusable, but so far efforts have not succeeded at scale.

For example, reusable McDonald's cups are only getting a 40 per cent return rate from customers in Germany, despite consumers paying a €2 deposit. When Starbucks trialled reusable cups in the closed environment of its Seattle HQ, where returning them is presumably straightforward, the return rate still didn't exceed 80 per cent.

We weren't exactly succumbing to dehydration on the streets before coffee shops designed takeaway cups

It's not that we don't care: research suggests consumer motivation towards environmentally positive behaviour is high. It's that as a society we have developed an expectation of convenience: to have what we want, when we want it, without any consequences.

This is entirely unreasonable – we weren't exactly succumbing to dehydration on the streets before coffee shops designed takeaway cups – but while it persists, consumers are very unlikely to switch to reusable alternatives if it puts them out. And without a high return-and-reuse rate, reusable packaging is usually worse for the environment, owing to the much higher quantities of plastic involved.

This is why we need to design for human behaviour if we're ever to get rid of single-use plastics. You cannot control what people will do with packaging once it leaves your premises, but you can influence them by factoring behavioural psychology into the design of the packaging itself.

The first step is understanding how consumers interact with the pack, throughout its lifecycle. Where are they and what are they doing when they open it? What's their headspace? How about when they're finished with it? There's a big difference between how someone interacts with a reusable plate after a meal in a cafeteria, and how they interact with the reusable salad bowl they're gobbling from on the lunchtime rush back to the office.

Then it's about understanding the levers you can pull to nudge people towards more planet-positive decisions. Behavioural psychology shows there are three factors that work together to drive behavioural change: increasing consumer motivation to recycle or reuse, raising their ability to do so, and providing a trigger to remind them.

Take plastic bags. While usage of single-use bags has dramatically decreased in the UK since legislation requiring retailers to charge for them came into force in 2015, reusable alternatives have had mixed success. According to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency and Greenpeace, 57 "bags for life" were sold for each household in the country in 2019 – more than one a week.

It's possible to go too far in signalling that a pack isn't disposable

Online grocer Ocado uses recyclable bags instead, but it has had success in achieving returns because it pulls all three behavioural psychology levers. Consumers are happy to receive bonus reward points for each bag they give back (motivation).

The bags are straightforward to return and customers know not to throw them away because of their clear messaging and distinct off-grey colour, which follows from not using harmful bleaching agents (ability). And because the driver usually asks for old bags after delivery, they're unlikely to forget (trigger).

Ability is the key consideration. If you wanted to return the packaging from a takeaway burger meal, it would mean washing and then carrying around a bulky burger box, fries box and cup, and either making a special trip to the restaurant or waiting until you happen upon another branch.

New Zealand start-up FOLDPROJECT has done some interesting work here, trying to make boxes more portable. It's a simple idea: a machine-washable lunch kit that packs down to a flat sheet. The challenge is that because it is so minimal, its form and material make it look disposable.

One way to ensure a reusable design communicates its intended purpose is through material choice. For example, using explicitly post-consumer recycled plastic could be a visual shorthand to communicate a planet-positive intent, as could using longer-lasting materials like glass or stoneware.

Interestingly, it's possible to go too far in signalling that a pack isn't disposable. When McDonald's introduced reusable packaging in its restaurants in France, it found the packaging kept disappearing, only to reappear on eBay. It looked reusable and on-brand, but was too novel for some, defeating the object.

So long as we have bins on every street that lead directly to landfill, we are going to struggle

Businesses cannot just switch to reusable packaging – even when intelligently designed – and expect results. So long as we have bins on every street that lead directly to landfill we are going to struggle.

We therefore need to think beyond just designing the packaging to be sustainable, and think about how we design systems to be sustainable. In a circular economy that means service and experience design, packaging, industrial design, marketing, data, artificial intelligence and logistics all working hand-in-hand to keep the pack "in the loop". It will therefore need to be an ecosystem effort.

We're already seeing innovations that can help make reuse and return viable in the age of convenience. For example, when is a bin not a bin? When it's a Bjarke Ingels Group-designed TURN system – a remote, digitally connected, RFID-enabled, packaging-asset reclaim and sorting network, which rejects unwanted trash.

Similarly, we're seeing nudge messaging along the pack journey, and even packs that communicate their status themselves. Scottish start-up Insignia has designed colour-changing labels that reveal how long a pack has been exposed to the environment. Imagine taking this further, with reusable packaging telling you what to do with it, and offering prompts or rewards to encourage you.

Reusability hasn't hit scale yet, but we should be optimistic that it can, not least because we've been there before. Milk deliveries were once the norm, with bottles returned, not discarded.

There's no reason that we can't get back to this more sustainable approach across the board, without having to endure too much inconvenience. All that's required is a little ingenuity, and a lot of collaboration.

The photography is by Jas Min via Unsplash.

Matt Millington is a sustainable-design strategist at PA Consulting.

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