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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British furniture retailer Habitat has revealed its 60th-anniversary collection, which features collaborations with emerging designers alongside revived archive pieces like the chicken brick.

Furniture and homeware by established designers including Sebastian Conran, Margo Selby and Tord Boontje populate Habitat's colourful 60 Years of Design collection, as well as work by newer talent such as furnituremaker Planq, ceramicist Silvia Kamodyová and artist Simone Brewster.

Novel designs rub shoulders with re-released classics in the collection from Habitat, which is an icon of British affordable design but has had a tumultuous recent history of buy-outs and store closures.

Among the revived archive products is the chicken brick from 1964 –  a ceramic oven dish for steam cooking and a classic from Habitat's first year in business – updated with a matte black glaze.

Also back on the roster are the modernist-inspired 1970s Scoop chair and 2004's Ribbon light – a table lamp made of folded and powder-coated sheet steel, which according to Habitat has become a collectible.

Some of the new designs also nod to Habitat's past.

Kamodyová referenced the 1980s Graffiti sofa in the colourful markings of her ceramics while the Lattice wire chair by Habitat designer Will Hudson is based on the wicker cone chairs of the 1970s and his bright red Akari four-poster bed was inspired by early Habitat catalogues.

Other highlights include the metal Lucinda garden furniture, which has precise cut-outs intended to cast captivating shadows, and Planq's XY60 coffee and side tables with surfaces made from recycled denim waste and legs in bright pops of blue or yellow.

Habitat designer D'arby Mawson's Cayan salt and pepper grinders look like a sculptural version of a wooden stacking game, while Brewster's bold-hued rugs are based on her own hand-paintings of the female form.

Sebastian Conran's contribution is a series of four lighting designs – including one inspired by the bulbous shapes of the Michelin Man – while Felix Conran designed mirrors with the gently contoured lines of river stones and Selby applied her graphic pattern designs to a range of textiles and bedding.

Habitat's head of design Andrew Tanner said that the brand's 60th anniversary offered an opportunity for the team to "look back and celebrate the last sixty years of Habitat's rich heritage".

"It's allowed us to reimagine classics from decades past for how we live now, as well as conceive new and thoughtful pieces that we hope will become collectables and represent the next generation of design," he said.

Habitat was founded in 1964 by Terence Conran, the highly influential British designer and retailer who also founded The Conran Shop, Benchmark Furniture and London's Design Museum.

In its first three decades, it helped to revolutionise British home decor tastes with its modern, clean-lined and European-inspired furniture and homewares.

But since then, the company has struggled and was sold three times over – first to IKEA in 1992, then to restructuring company Hilco in 2009 and finally to the Home Retail Group in 2011, which now largely sells the brand's products through its Sainsbury's and Argos stores and online.

However, contrary to Elle Decoration editor Michelle Ogundehin's proclamation that the brand was "as good as dead" after the last sale and Conran's own observation that his "love child, Habitat, appears to be dying", the company has persevered.

Tanner expressed optimism for Habitat's future and said that the company is in a better position now than ever before to create products that are true to its vision.

"Habitat has always championed great design and was founded on the concept of quality homeware that turns heads," Tanner told Dezeen. "We want to continue to be known for this moving forward. We are able, like never before, to create design-led products that are accessible and affordable to all."

Other highlights from Habitat's past include the first collection of former creative director Polly Dickens in 2012, which aimed to take the brand back to its "original Conran days" after the takeovers, and a VIP for Kids range that touted designs by the likes of actors Kate Winslet and Daniel Radcliffe.

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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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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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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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Methane data and dishonest oil company advertising are juxtaposed in Smoke and Mirrors, a new visualisation produced by artist and musician Beatie Wolfe in collaboration with visual effects studio Parliament.

Debuting last week at South by Southwest, Smoke and Mirrors doubles as a video clip for Wolfe's song Oh My Heart, which was released in 2022 on the world's first bioplastic vinyl.

While plumes of brown gas slowly engulf an image of planet Earth, the video displays phrases like "out to clean our air", "unsettled science" and "don't risk our future" – all slogans used in oil industry advertising from 1970 to today.

The final text overlay reads "net-zero" and beneath it "achieving net-zero emissions is part of our powering progress strategy", and is from a 2023 Shell ad.

"Smoke and Mirrors is about visualising not just the methane data (smoke) in a way people can really absorb but also the disinformation (mirrors), which has caused the data to be denied, doubted and delayed through the decades," Wolfe told Dezeen.

Smoke and Mirrors follows another climate-themed interactive video installation Wolfe made in 2021, which used her song From Green to Red and was displayed at COP26.

Wolfe said the idea for Smoke and Mirrors came after seeing how that project "helped people to see the data differently and to absorb it via the power of art".

"Realising that a big piece of the climate puzzle (how we got to this critical point) has been the fossil fuel industry's response to the emerging environmental awareness of the 1970s and that methane emissions (30 times more potent than carbon for trapping heat) are increasingly linked with that industry, I wanted to illuminate this key parallel timeline," she said.

"With From Green to Red, it was about looking at 800,000 years of rising CO2 levels, while this is about looking at just 50/60 years of rising methane levels but set alongside the advertising campaigns that have been running during this critical period in human history," Wolfe continued.

The smoke visualisation in the video represents methane entering into Earth's atmosphere while a counter at the top of the visualisation shows the levels quickly going up in parts per billion (ppb).

The methane data comes from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), two US government agencies. The research on oil company advertising was undertaken by Wolfe, who credits work done by academics Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes as helping "enormously".

The way the Earth is visualised is based on NASA's famous Blue Marble photograph, taken from space.

A dedicated website for Smoke and Mirrors expands on the data and research included in the video.

Wolfe is a singer-songwriter known for integrating music and art, often by pioneering new formats for audio. In addition to From Green to Red, her previous work has included an album presented as a deck of cards.

SXSW 2024 takes place from 8 to 16 March 2024 at various locations in Austin, USA. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Brutalism, septic tanks and a rejection of the sci-fi status quo informed the set design of the film Dune: Part Two, production designer Patrice Vermette tells Dezeen in this interview featuring exclusive images.

Vermette worked on both parts of the movie Dune, an adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel realised by director Denis Villeneuve.

The second film continues to explore the book's themes of colonialism, environmentalism and religion as its warring factions battle for control over the resource-rich desert planet of Arrakis.

Villeneuve and Vermette – who also worked together on Villeneuve's science fiction movie Arrival – focused on creating a rich and original visual language for the Dune films, which are set thousands of years in the future.

"What's fascinating about the book, for the design aspect of it, is that it doesn't give you all the answers," Vermette told Dezeen.

While Herbert gave detailed descriptions of the conditions of each planet, he wasn't as descriptive when it came to what specific locations looked like, leaving plenty of room for imagination.

"It gives you just the right amount of pieces of the puzzle to help you understand what the realities of those planets are," said Vermette.

The designer said that with such detailed descriptions of site conditions, he found he was putting himself "in the position of the architect or the founder of that place" in order to meet a brief outlined by Herbert.

For Arrakis's capital city of Arrakeen, the design team knew there were winds of 180 kilometres per hour, unbearable heat, giant sandworms that are drawn to vibration in the desert sands, and that the Atreides' residence there is the largest ever made by humankind.

In response, the team created building facades imagined at an angle for the winds to sweep over, with thick rock walls to keep them cool, and the whole city is situated in a rocky valley between mountains that offers protection from the elements – as well as any monsters underfoot.

The buildings were also given a brutalist aesthetic, in reference to the way in which Soviet architecture was used "as a show of force" in regions it colonised.

Herbert's story takes inspiration from the Middle East, and different factions in it are often interpreted as representing the USSR and Western powers as they sought control of its oil.

"There's a conversation between the natural elements and what the different cultures are about, and you need to have a reflection on that to be able to start designing," said Vermette.

After the success of Part One – which earned six Oscars, including best production design for Vermette – the creative team had licence to go even bigger for Part Two.

Forty per cent more sets were built, and some 35,000 square metres of soundstages were used in Budapest in addition to several football fields worth of backlots and desert locations in Abu Dhabi and Jordan.

Among the most memorable new settings in Part Two is Giedi Prime, the industrial homeworld of House Harkonnen, which appeared minimally in Part One.

The Harkonnens – a brutal family line incensed at having been removed from control in Arrakis – are depicted in the film using dark and grotesque imagery, including a mountainous leader who bathes in viscous black oil.

"I was excited about the Harkonnens," said Vermette. "Denis always imagined a world that is repulsive."

Villeneuve requested a world that was "black and plastic" for the Harkonnens, and the oil became an additional textural element because of its relationship to plastic.

"It came from how Frank Herbert's book talked about overexploitation of the natural resources of Giedi Prime," said Vermette.

The inspiration Vermette needed to flesh out the Harkonnen homeworld for Part Two came when he passed a field full of black moulded plastic septic tanks while driving outside Montreal, where he is based.

It made sense to him that given the Harkonnens' character, that's where they would live. This aesthetic of black moulded plastic, combined with giant rib formations reminiscent of being in the belly of a whale and references to spiders and ticks, came to embody the buildings and machinery of the Harkonnens.

Septic tanks may be an unlikely starting point for an architectural language, but it's an example of how Villeneuve's vision can produce original results.

"The great thing about working with Denis is that he doesn't accept the status quo, which I love – meaning if we've seen it before, it's not interesting for him," said Vermette.

Giedi Prime is also home to the biggest set for Dune: Part Two: a battle arena similar to a triangle-shaped Colosseum, which was filmed with infrared cameras and desaturated to evoke the otherworldly look of being under the planet's black sun.

It was built using a technique the creative team had pioneered on the Dune movies for big sets, where only a relatively small part necessary for close-up and medium shots is built in detail – in this case, the arena's entrance.

The rest of the arena was completed with fabric-wrapped wooden frames representing the volumes of the building, which were then detailed with computer-generated imagery (CGI) in post-production.

The process aimed to block out natural light falling into the space and across actors' bodies in the same way that the walls or beams of the building would.

Otherwise, this alignment of light and shadow can be difficult to get right in post-production and becomes a telltale sign that visual effects have been used.

Although this approach was time-consuming, restricting filming to just a couple of hours a day when the sun was in the right place and keeping Vermette and his team constantly watching how shadows were cast, it enabled them to achieve the photorealistic look that they desired.

A final touch to the arena scene and the unnerving world of the Harkonnens are fireworks that appear like ink spatters rather than explosions.

"About 30 versions" of these fireworks were invented, according to Vermette, including one based on the structure of cancer cells, before the final design was chosen.

"It's a splotch of ink dropping on a glass surface," said Vermette. "It's like oil; it blends into the same type of aesthetics."

In contrast to the Harkonnens, another new world introduced in Dune: Part Two shows harmony with nature – even though that nature is the harsh and water-scarce planet of Arrakis.

This is the world of the Fremen, who live in "sietches" built into the rock. The descriptions of the Fremen in the book have been interpreted as referencing Arab cultures, particularly that of the nomadic Bedouin.

But for the film, Vermette said, "we did not want to borrow cultural elements from one culture in particular, because I don't think it would have been right".

Although the Middle Eastern references remain the strongest, they are combined with elements from the Mayans and the Aztecs – other cultures from the Global South that have faced colonisation, which Vermette says was intended to broaden this thematic exploration.

A third new world, Kaitain, the seat of the empire, was the only one to make use of a work of existing architecture: architect Carlo Scarpa's post-modernist Brion Tomb, a burial ground and garden in the mountains of Italy where concrete is sculpted with intersecting planes and geometric cutaways.

The Dune: Part Two team was the first to get permission to film there, although Vermette had already used Scarpa's work as an inspiration for settings in the first movie.

"On Part One, I was inspired by his architectural language for both Arrakeen and [Atreides home planet] Caladan," said Vermette. "But it makes sense that the aesthetics of the imperial planet influence the rest of the other planets."

"It's just like in real life. It dictates what's the taste, what's fashionable," said Vermette.

It's an example of how the film employs brutalism in a nuanced way – in some places stark and others poetic. Vermette particularly borrowed from Brazilian brutalism, which he says is "more sophisticated", as well as Scarpa's work.

"I've got a particular love for Scarpa, because I think it's his own world," said Vermette. "Maybe someone can say it's brutalism, but it's not really at the same time. It's really unique and distinct."

Photos courtesy of Warner Bros Entertainment Inc.

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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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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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The late works of American artist and designer Wendell Castle have gone on display at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London, showing the evolution of his signature stack-lamination technique.

Castle, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 85, is known as one of the pioneers of American art furniture, combining his training in both industrial design and sculpture to make one-off functional pieces.

The Carpenters Workshop Gallery solo exhibition Suspended Disbelief displays works the designer created between 2011 and 2015.

The period saw Castle return to the biomorphic style and stack-lamination technique that had characterised his most famous works of the 1960s and 70s, augmented with new ideas and technologies.

Stack lamination involves glueing planks of wood together to make a large block, which Castle would then carve into. The artist built the blocks with an idea of the work he was going to carve in mind, so he could build up the approximate shape in cross sections.

With his later series of works, he added another element: digital technologies such as 3D modelling, scanning and laser cutting. These allowed him to achieve ever more elaborate creations because he could obtain accurate cross-sections of 3D models in a way that he couldn't from 2D drawings, and cut them equally precisely.

"Scale and form could be pushed even further and with more complexity than ever before, resulting in the spectacular, large-scale works on show in the exhibition," Carpenters Workshop Gallery co-founder Loïc Le Gaillard told Dezeen.

The works on show as part of Suspended Disbelief are elongated and multi-limbed, sometimes monumental. They emerge from the floor like creatures from the bowels of the earth.

Stained in a black finish, the organic forms have an enigmatic appearance and push the boundaries of what we understand as timber.

Works made in steel, bronze and nickel are also on display. But laminated wood is the material he most often returned to, appreciating the way it allowed him to sculpt complex forms while ensuring structural integrity.

Castle explained that digital tools had allowed him unprecedented freedom in a video filmed by his daughter Alison Castle and gallery Friedman Benda before his death.

"Even though you think that you're not designing with your abilities very much in mind, you are," he said.

"Something just keeps you from designing things that you just could not possibly make, or you couldn't possibly make in any reasonable way. You can kind of throw that out the window now."

Carpenters Workshop Gallery has exhibited Castle's work since the early 2000s – including solo shows in both London and Paris – and has continued to work with the artist's estate since his death.

Le Gaillard said that it had been "a dream come true and a humbling experience" to work with Castle in his lifetime.

"Wendell emanated a sense of wisdom and humility," said Le Gaillard. "He had limited opportunities to travel outside of his home in Kansas during his childhood, so he always said how incredible it was for him to be able to travel and show his work in places like London or Paris later in his career."

Le Gaillard founded the Carpenters Workshop Gallery with his childhood friend Julien Lombrail in 2006, starting in a literal carpenter's workshop in London's Mayfair.

The gallery specialises in functional art and collectible design and now has five galleries worldwide, including a new London space in Ladbroke Hall, Notting Hill.

Castle was interviewed by Dezeen in 2017, where he spoke about the "organic" vocabulary of his work. "Sometimes I think of it as actually growing from a seed/idea," he said.

The photography is by Benjamin Baccarani unless otherwise stated.

Wendell Castle: Suspended Disbelief is on at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London, UK, from 9 February to 27 April 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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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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Designer Job Smeets has collaborated with Firmship – the yacht brand of former Moooi CEO Casper Vissers – to create a limited-edition Land Rover Defender defined by the same stark minimalism and historic references as its ships.

Made in a limited run of 25, the SUV has a stripped-back monochrome look both inside and out.

Its exterior is finished in Firmship's signature colour RAL 7035 – a light grey that was selected for its versatility and timelessness.

According to Firmships, it is the perfect neutral with no cool or warm overtones so it can complement a wide range of colours and materials including wood, metals, concrete and glass.

To emphasise durability, Firmship has sprayed the car with a lacquer that it says is the strongest and toughest metal lacquer available in the world, used in bulldozers and public phone boxes in the US.

"It gives the Defender a tactile surface texture," the company said. "If you touch the Firmship Defender, you feel something strong but silent."

Firmship was founded by Vissers to build luxury vessels that nod to classic boats. Its latest model, the Firmship 55, references the forms and detailing of an archetypal workboat like a fishing boat.

To promote the brand, the company is "firmshipping" products from other brands, which it feels share the same design philosophy.

This involves reimagining the products in the same style as Firmship's boats, starting with the Land Rover Defender.

"The brand stands for longevity and adopts revised iconic archetypes with today's newest technology," said Vissers.

"We are a start-up and new in the business, so to express this philosophy we believe we should connect to other 'firm' brands who have already built an iconic design, like the Defender."

The Dutch entrepreneur defines "firm" brands as ones that outlast trends and says he admires the Defender, which was launched in 1948, as one of the best examples of such an object.

The Jaguar Land Rover brand was not initially involved in the customisation; Vissers' team simply bought a Defender and "firmshipped" it on their own initiative.

But Visser says that Jaguar Landrover BeNeLux CEO Marc Bienemann ended up liking the result and now it can be ordered through participating dealerships.

Aside from the paint finish, Firmship's eye towards the past is reflected in the British Heritage rims of the Land Rover, a revised version of the car's original wheels.

Its interior, meanwhile, was designed to be completely harmonious with the outside, with leather and fabric seats that feature horizontal ribbing in a nod to early Defenders.

Smeets said that while he might not be known for restraint in his more provocative work with Studio Job, minimalism is "simply like using another palette".

"Whether I am working for Hermès, Swarovski or Firmship, I adjust the lens through which I'm looking," said Smeets. "It still has the Job vision on its clever details or bold appearance but this time it's with texture, stark blankness and boldness in its monochrome."

Smeets has been working with Firmship since Vissers commissioned its first boat design, the Firmship 42, for his personal use in 2010. Vissers had intended to commercialise the boat design but said his plans were put on hold by the financial crisis.

To Smeets, "Firmship is really about friendship" because it allowed him to help Vissers "realise a dream".

"Studio Job will always be my biggest creative challenge because it's so complex and it wants to renew constantly," he said. "Studio Job is my art. Firmship feels like cruising along, floating. Enjoying."

Vissers' other projects since Moooi include the furniture and lighting brand Revised.

Studio Job's recent work has included a dystopia window installation for fashion brand Hermès and a lava lamp inspired by actual lava.

The studio also has experience customising Land Rover Defenders, having created a more colourful version in 2013 that was designed to resemble "a Popemobile for an African chief".

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The Design Space AlUla gallery is set to open this weekend in a Corten steel-latticed building designed by Italian architects Giò Forma Studio in the town of AlUla, Saudi Arabia.

Situated in a low-lying complex, Design Space AlUla was established by the government-led Royal Commission for AlUla as part of a wider redevelopment of the region. It aims to showcase works from around the country and overseas and build a local design community.

The space's opening exhibition, Mawrid: Celebrating Inspired Design, presents 10 recent projects in AlUla spanning everything from the "macro", such as architecture and urban design, to the "micro" of graphic and jewellery design.

The showcased projects include the Cultural Oasis District masterplan by UK practice Prior + Partners, a mirrored concert hall by Giò Forma Studio and Black Engineering that sits in the desert like a mirage and SAL Architects' restrained renovation of a local mosque, demonstrating the guidelines set for regeneration projects within AlUla.

On the more "micro" end of the spectrum, there is the visual identity and logo for Design Space AlUla, created by designers Clara Sancho and Pascal Zoghbi in reference to the building's lattice screens.

The AlUla project also encompasses a design award, now in its second year, and a new design residency – both of which are showcased as part of the inaugural exhibition.

Projects from the AlUla Design Award include a jewellery design by Bahraini architect Sara Kanoo based on the pyramidal motifs of the ancient tombs in nearby Hegra and a folding chair that doubles as a prayer mat by Saudi designer firm Shaddah Studio.

The gallery is contained within a building designed by Italian architects Giò Forma Studio and Black Engineering, which was completed in 2022 and is recognisable for its facade of rust-coloured Corten steel.

This wraps around the building on all sides and features a cut-out pattern inspired by the modernist breeze blocks commonly used in the district's architecture.

Lattice-like and delicate-looking, the screens cast dramatic shadows into the interior courtyard and some of the galleries.

The name and vision for Design Space AlUla came after the building, once the character and needs of the revitalised AlUla area were more established, according to architect, urban planner and Design Space AlUla curator Sara Ghani.

Ghani and her team consulted widely to develop their plans for the institution, including with former London Design Museum co-director Alice Black, and Ghani says she wants the space to become "a benchmark to the world".

In addition, design itself has come to play an increasingly important role in the identity of the area as the project developed, with designers invited to produce street furniture or products coming up with highly location-specific responses.

"It was apparent that everything we were doing here is a design activity," said Ghani. "We felt that we really needed a space within AlUla to showcase everything that's being done."

The space was built as part of a comprehensive masterplan to preserve and regenerate the wider area – one that Ghani told Dezeen was designed to fit in with and enhance the natural and cultural landscape.

"You will never see a high-rise skyscraper building in AlUla," said Ghani, who also served as planning and design lead on the AlUla development project. "We're doing everything we can as the custodians and the guardians of this landscape to preserve the rich heritage."

The AlUla area includes an old town that provided an oasis on an ancient trading route between Damascus and Medina, as well as the UNESCO World Heritage site of Hegra, built by the Nabataean people in the same period when they built Petra in Jordan.

The government-led Royal Commission for AlUla has been in charge of developing the area for tourism since 2017 and has taken a distinctly different approach than that seen in the mega projects that Saudi Arabia has become known for, such as Neom and The Line.

Here, the strategy has been to ensure all new buildings and renovations have a low visual impact that does not interfere with the natural landscape and heritage architecture and to engage local residents, who Ghani says are "very creative".

The development of AlUla forms part of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 programme, which is intended to diversify the country's economy away from oil.

Also planned for AlUla are a cave hotel carved into desert hills by French architect Jean Nouvel and a Bedouin-inspired luxury tent resort by French architecture studio AW2.

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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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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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Royal Carribbean's near-10,000-capacity Icon of the Seas has set sail on its maiden voyage amid controversy over the environmental impact of its new fuel.

The 20-deck-high Icon of the Seas, which is the world's largest cruise ship, set off from Miami on Saturday, headed on its first cruise in the Caribbean.

Designed with contributions from Skylab Architecture, Wilson Butler Architects, 3Deluxe and RTKL, the ship weighs 248,663 gross tonnes – around five Titanics – and has room for 7,600 guests and 2,350 crew.

Onboard are 2,805 cabins, seven pools, the world's largest ship-based waterpark and eight separate "neighbourhoods" that are home to restaurants, bars and entertainment.

There are also two tanks of liquified natural gas (LNG) — a first-time fuel source for Royal Carribbean, which has called it "the cleanest fossil fuel available" and the Icon of the Seas its "most sustainable ship yet".

However, critics have said the cruise line has failed to include methane leakage from the new fuel system in its emissions calculations.

The use of LNG, also known as methane, cuts down on dangerous pollutants like sulfur and nitrogen oxides, and is estimated to produce about 30 per cent less carbon dioxide emissions than the heavy fuel oils currently used in cruise ships. However, not all of the gas is successfully burned during use — some of it always escapes into the atmosphere.

Because methane is considered worse than carbon dioxide for the atmosphere over the short term – it breaks down faster, but it is about 80 times more potent over a 20-year-period – it's estimated that the switch could be overall worse for greenhouse gas emissions.

"They are doubling down by calling LNG a green fuel when the engine is emitting 70 to 80 per cent more greenhouse gas emissions per trip than if it used regular marine fuel," International Council of Clean Transportation (ICCT) marine programme director Bryan Comer told the Guardian.

"Icon has the largest LNG tanks ever installed in a ship. It is greenwashing."

The ICCT released a report about methane emissions from LNG-fuelled ships on January 25, two days before the Icon of the Seas set sail.

For its part, Royal Carribbean says that LNG will be a "transitional fuel" on the way to its first net-zero cruise ship, which it plans to introduce by 2035.

The Icon of the Seas has a dual-fuel engine so it can use both diesel and LNG, and among the other energy-saving initiatives on board is the first waste-to-energy plant to operate at sea.

Royal Carribbean has pitched the Icon of the Seas as a "multigenerational family holiday", with CEO and president Michael Bayley describing it as a "a one-of-a-kind vacation for every type of family and adventurer".

Constructed at the shipyard of Meyer Turku in Finland over five years, the vessel was built in "grand blocks" that Royal Carribbean said were assembled like Lego.

Among its six waterslides is one that cantilevers over the ocean, while its seven pools include a suspended infinity pool.

Its eight neighbourhoods include "Thrill Island", which is home to waterparks and a "Crown's Edge" adventure described as "part skywalk, part ropes course and part thrill ride on which adventurers swing 154 feet above the ocean".

There is also Chill Island with its pools, Central Park with its greenery and open air, and the AquaDome entertainment complex, said to be the largest glass and steel structure to be lifted onto a cruise ship.

The 365-metre-long Icon of the Seas went viral when its renders were revealed last year, showing a teeming mass of people, cabanas and colourful slides.

One X user compared it to a Hieronymus Bosch painting and another to "the Candy Crush version of the dystopian underground world in Silo".

Cruise lines have been under pressure to switch from petroleum, with research suggesting that a large cruise ship can have a carbon footprint greater than 12,000 cars.

A perhaps more promising effort at sustainable shipping came last year from the Mitsubishi Corporation, which retrofitted a cargo ship with sails so it could be powered by wind.

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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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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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British design studio Layer has aimed to bring sustainability to mattress design in a collaboration with Chinese start-up Mazzu, creating a modular, foamless product made up of textile-covered springs.

The Mazzu Open mattress was designed to have the comfort of a traditional sprung mattress while being adaptable, repairable and easy to pack down when moving house, so as to prolong the product's life.

The design features row upon row of individually textile-wrapped pocket springs, which sit sandwiched between a base "matrix" and a cushioned topper to hold them in place.

All its components are either recyclable or biodegradable, and no glue was used in the construction of the mattress.

The structure — left open at the sides for a distinctive, utilitarian look — also has the benefit of being hygienic, according to the studio, as users can check the inside of the mattress and take it apart to clean every element.

The modular design of the mattress means buyers can treat the springs like "pixels", choosing between three levels of firmness for each point in the matrix to create a support pattern of their choosing. This also allows couples to customise their own side of the bed.

Additional spring modules and a different base and topper can be added to change the size of the mattress, and the whole kit can compress down to around 80 per cent of its size when disassembled.

The mattress comes in a reusable packaging system, also designed by Layer, that sees it divided into small components and split across several cartons, each weighing less than 10 kilograms. The spring modules compress from 250 millimetres to 50 millimetres in height as part of this.

Layer founder Benjamin Hubert told Dezeen that the studio tried to tackle multiple problems with current mattresses in one go with Mazzu, ranging from the impracticability of transporting them to the lack of customisation.

"They are too bulky once you unpack them and they 'inflate' from their compressed shipped form," said Hubert. "They contain huge amounts of foam, which is next to impossible to recycle, and for the most part you can't pack them down again for storage or transport."

The studio wanted to avoid using polyurethane foam, a common mattress material, because as well as being difficult to recycle, it is energy intensive to produce and generates volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are harmful to health.

The material is technically recyclable, but most mattresses do not reach the scarce recycling facilities, and they are often discarded before their time. In the UK, for instance, around 6.4 million mattresses are thrown away each year — about one for every ten people — and only around 14 per cent of them are recycled.

Instead of foam, the Mazzu Open mattress's hourglass-shaped springs are shrouded in a two-tone 3D-knit polyester sleeve. The other materials used are steel for the springs, ABS plastic for the connection system and wool for the topper. The wool is biodegradable, while all the other materials are recyclable.

Hubert describes Mazzu as "leading the way" in delivering sustainable, high-performance bedding, and says the companies worked together for three years through the pandemic.

They went through many iterations of the mattress design in that time, as the studio tried to find a connection solution that would be both simple and comfortable.

"We must have tried about 20 different connection techniques," said Hubert. "We had to find an optimum size that could be calibrated to fit all the standard mattress sizes too — not easy given there are a lot of international sizes."

"The system needed to be highly cost-effective by using the least amount of parts and the simplest connection feature," he continued. "The design of the connection systems changed dozens of times as we tested strength, ease of use, noise and comfort — we had hundreds of springs in the studio at times!"

Other recent designs from the London-based design studio have included sustainable dog toys for Canadian company Earth Rated and a green hydrogen vehicle retrofitting system for US start-up Croft.

Mazzu and Layer launched the Mazzu Open mattress at the German furniture fair IMM Cologne, which was held from 14 to 18 January. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Former Ferrari-designer Lowie Vermeersch has created a new type of micro vehicle intended to push traditional cars off the road. In this interview, he discusses new start-up Komma and his vision for the future of mobility.

"I always say, moving an 80-kilo person with 2.5 tonnes of material is not something we should consider as the best we can do, especially in an urban environment," said Vermeersch.

The Granstudio founder has previously overseen the design of the Ferrari FF and 458 Italia while design director at Pininfarina and led work on the Maserati Birdcage 75th concept car.

His latest project – Komma, invented together with Punkt founder and CEO Petter Neby – has a much smaller footprint. A covered, electric two-seater vehicle with car-like seats but a narrow width like a motorcycle, it is designed to take up less space on the roads and use less material to manufacture.

"Just making cars electric is not fully answering what is needed," Vermeersch told Dezeen. "We also need to be looking at how we can use less resources."

Neby and Vermeersch intend to do more with Komma than only manufacture vehicles, however; they plan to use the company to advocate for a shift in mobility away from the car and towards other, diverse modes of transport.

They hope that Komma can influence urban design in the 21st century in a similar way to how cars shaped cities in the 20th century, this time not with highways and suburbs but features that promote sustainability and wellbeing.

Startup seeks to "ignite a change in urban mobility"

Komma began life in late 2019, after Neby approached Vermeersch with "a need that he had lived himself, for a type of vehicle that he felt was missing", Vermeersch said.

The design and development were handled by Vermeersch's team at Granstudio, the transport-focused design studio he founded in 2010, while entrepreneur Neby brought experience in minimalist electronics from his company Punkt, whose devices include a dumbphone designed by Jasper Morrison.

The Komma car – which comes in two models, one fully closed and one open at the sides – is designed to carry one or two people as well as a small amount of cargo, such as shopping, on trips around the city or suburbs.

The company claims the vehicle covers 90 per cent of car-use needs while requiring only 30 per cent of the material resources and energy, and that it can bring pleasure back to the daily drive.

The narrow maximum width of 90 centimetres is, says Vermeersch, particularly key to the transformative potential of the vehicle.

"We always looked at: what will be the consequence if you have mass adoption of this kind of vehicle, and is that consequence positive?" said the designer.

"That's why we worked so hard on making a vehicle that is only half of a car width – which is narrower than a motorcycle – because only then can you ignite a change in urban mobility."

"At a certain point, a city could decide to just paint one extra line in the middle of the street that could become dedicated to such kinds of vehicles," he argued. "Whereas most of the microcar offerings, which are wider, do not have that potential because they need to behave like cars and need to move together with cars."

Push for change in mobility about being "true to what in essence cars stood for"

Vermeersch and Neby plan to be active in shaping the future of mobility through Komma. They see vehicle design and urban design as feeding into each other, and believe that if a new, nimble vehicle archetype emerges, it could enable cities to gradually reduce the road space and parking given to cars and allocate more room to pedestrians and community activities.

Vermeersch says the company will try to partner with local governments and infrastructure and mobility companies to develop pilot projects in this space, claiming the Komma is a good fit for car share schemes, taxi services and private ownership alike.

While it may seem like blasphemy for a car-lover to actively pursue a reduction in their manufacture and use, Vermeersch contends that his position is about honouring the idea behind the invention rather than being "stuck to the object" itself.

"If you want to be true to what in essence cars stood for, they stood for a sort of individual freedom of mobility," he said. "And I think everybody would agree that a car being stuck in a traffic jam is not living up to that."

Future vision for transport needs to have "human pleasure at its heart"

Vermeersch insists he is not anti-cars. He believes they will, and should, continue to play a role in the transport ecosystem, albeit a reduced one.

"For me, the future of cars is as part of a more diverse mobility spectrum, whereas until now, the car has been rather dominating the spectrum," he said. "The problems that we have with cars are not so much in the car itself but how we use it and where we use it."

"I think the car will still be in the future the best and most ecological solution for many, many uses," he continued. "And with 'car', I mean a kind of improved future car, so electric is definitely one step of it. I'd also like to see cars developing more lightness."

Vermeersch is also keen to shift the discourse away from being either "for or against" cars, which he sees as feeding into a culture war where freedom is pitched in opposition to over-consumption.

"The search for a better way of living is not helped if we take these absolute positions," said Vermeersch. "It's as if the car is the origin for all the bad things that's going on. That's not true."

Rather, he thinks we should see the move away from cars in cities as a "positive story" of the evolution of mobility.

"For me, in that picture of a more diverse mobility spectrum there's also place for having the cars that you really have fun with," he said. "And maybe it's not the car you own; maybe it's the car that you use on the weekend or share."

"Any scenario that we think about the future, if it will not have human pleasure at its heart, it's destined to fail. I think that's the part that keeps me connected to what people are passionate about with cars."

Designers must "look beyond the archetype of cars"

Komma hopes to release its vehicle by the end of 2025 targeting Europe as well as the USA and Canada as its first markets.

It will have a top speed of 130 kilometres per hour, equivalent to some of Europe's highest road-speed limits, and include car-like active safety features such as anti-lock brakes, airbags and anti-collision controls.

For the battery, there will be the option of either a single 7.5 kilowatt-hour or twin 15 kilowatt-hour module – both much smaller than in a standard-sized electric car but giving an expected range of up to 200 kilometres, similar to an electric Mini Cooper.

Vermeersch says that Granstudio designed the vehicle from the ground up to take advantage of the "geometric freedom" offered by electric drivetrains, which allow the engine to be virtually hidden inside the wheel rather than shaping the layout of the vehicle.

To add the desired element of pleasurability to the driving experience, there is torque vectoring on the wheels for improved grip, and the semi-open version of Komma has been given motorcycle-like handling, with a handlebar for steering and a tilt mechanism on the wheels.

"Knowing so well how cars are made also allows you to see new opportunities when new technologies come," said Vermeersch. "I think what is needed is more people looking into solutions who are, on one hand, broad-minded enough to look beyond the archetype of cars, but on the other hand, have enough knowledge of them to also understand how you can do that."

"There's fantastic things happening within the car business, and there's fantastic ideas about mobility at the broader scale, the urban scale, but they have a hard time overlapping," he continued. "Komma and also Granstudio for me is really about that."

The photography and images are courtesy of Komma.

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US start-up Rabbit and tech company Teenage Engineering have designed the R1, a "pocket companion" that aims to upturn the dominance of smartphones in our lives by using artificial intelligence to complete tasks.

Revealed at last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the Rabbit R1 is a palm-sized, bright orange AI assistant that is designed to take actions on behalf of its user, even where those actions involve multiple or complex steps.

The device, which the company described as a "pocket companion", could be used to book flights, stream music or edit Photoshop images, among other uses.

Users push and hold a button on the right-hand side of the device to talk to their R1 as they would a walkie-talkie, issuing commands in natural language and viewing a simplified visual interface that represents their assistant as a pixel art-styled bunny.

Rabbit is asking consumers to rethink many of their digital habits with the pared-back invention, including how they interact with apps, what security norms they accept, and how their devices can look.

At a CES keynote address, Rabbit founder and CEO Jesse Lyu said that the company had aimed to create "the simplest computer" and a "delightful" user experience — "something so intuitive that you don't need to learn how to use it".

"The best way to achieve this is to break away from the app-based operating system currently used by smartphones," he said. "Instead, we envision a natural language-centred approach."

The R1 hosts Rabbit's custom AI, a type of Large Action Model (LAM). LAMs represent an evolution of the Large Language Models (LLMs) that have become well-known from chatbots like ChatGPT.

Whereas those merely generate text in response to human input, Lyu explained, Rabbit's AI also generates actions on behalf of users — activities like buying groceries online or booking taxis or tickets.

These sorts of personal AI "agents" have been increasingly hyped online, but Rabbit claims theirs is the first operating system built with such a LAM.

The LAM works by first learning to understand people's intentions and behaviours on specific apps, then mimicking those actions. There is no need for custom integrations like Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for each app, as the model is universal and functions across all mobile and desktop environments.

At launch, Rabbit says the R1 will already have been trained to work with the most popular apps, and it will continue to roll out more functionalities in the future. It will also add the ability for users to train their own agents — or "rabbits" — on more niche apps.

The device is standalone and does not need to be connected to a smartphone to function.

For the industrial design, Rabbit worked with Teenage Engineering — known for its innovative takes on music gadgets like synthesisers and speakers — to develop an original look with a nostalgic touch.

The company says it took cues from the Tamagotchi – the Japanese digital toy pet – and aimed to make the device "as strikingly beautiful as it is intuitively functional".

As well as a 2.88-inch touchscreen display and the touch-to-talk button, the physical components include a scroll wheel to navigate the display and the "rabbit eye" — a rotating camera for computer vision. This enables the agents to carry out tasks like "looking" in the fridge and identifying the ingredients there to suggest a recipe.

As an avatar, the operating system is represented on the screen by a bunny head that jumps up and down while processing information and bops along with headphones when playing music.

Rabbit says there are security benefits to many of its design choices. The touch-to-talk button avoids the "always listening mode" of smart speakers, a gadget that Lyu described as "outdated" in his keynote.

Similarly, the rotating capability of the "eye" keeps the camera lens in a position where it is physically blocked until the user requests it, cutting off another avenue for surveillance.

Rabbit also promises a high level of encryption, and says that users will always have awareness and control of the actions delegated to the agents. The device will not store the user's credentials for third-party services.

All of the processing is done within data centres rather than on the device, which Rabbit says means the device is inexpensive — it retails for US$199 (£159) — and consumes little power.

It does, however, add to the demand on data centres, which require huge amounts of water and electricity.

Lyu said that with the LAM fast evolving, the R1 would eventually help users do things that could never be achieved on an app-based phone, but that the device is not intended as a direct substitute.

"We did not build Rabbit R1 to replace your phone," he said. "It's just a different generation of devices. The app-based system was introduced more than 15 years ago, and the new generation of AI-powered devices are just getting started."

Since CES, Rabbit has since taken pre-orders for more than 30,000 R1 units.

Other devices on show at the trade fair, the largest in the field of consumer gadgets, included a world-first transparent OLED television by LG and a "thermometer of the future" by Withings.

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Designed by Marc Newson and unveiled at this week's Consumer Electronics Show, Swarovski Optik's AX Visio binoculars are equipped with artificial intelligence so they can identify bird and animal species.

Swarovski Optik — the segment of the Swarovski group dedicated to sports optics such as binoculars and rifle scopes — said it considers AX Visio to be the world's first smart binoculars, capable of identifying some 9,000 species of birds and wildlife in real time.

It targets mainly birdwatchers but also hunters with the invention, which has an augmented reality display so users can see species information overlaid on the image in front of them, and don't need to look away to consult a book, phone or friend.

Users turn a digital camera-like dial to the bird or mammal identification mode to enable the feature and click a button to begin identification.

The AX Visio also includes a camera for taking photos and videos and a "share discoveries" mode that lets users mark the location of an item of interest before passing the binoculars to another person.

Without the digital features switched on, the AX Visio still functions as a set of analogue binoculars, and there is an extra lens in between the usual two objective lenses to enable the digital functions.

"The AX Visio's added value for users consists of a real viewing experience that is enhanced with digital input," said Swarovski Optik chief technology and operations officer Andreas Gerk.

In an interview on the Swarovski Optik website, industrial designer Newson said that it had been special to work on a product that was the first of its kind and that integrating all of the technology — including augmented reality, Bluetooth, GPS and a camera — inside the small package had been a challenge.

"It's rare for a designer to work on something that is the first product within a category, which is naturally exciting and suffice to say, challenging," said Newson. "Binoculars are traditionally solely analogue objects, which, while compelling and 'future proof', are essentially bi-dimensional."

"The AX Visio belongs to a different typology, and one that is totally new in the combination of optics and technology," he added. "Similar to a modern camera, they are optical, electronic and digital."

The AX Visio is Newson's second product for Swarovski Optik following the CL Curio, a compact pair of traditional binoculars. AX Visio has a similar extruded aluminium bridge and focus wheel placement as that design.

Newson said he aimed for the AX Visio to be "intuitive, modern and crucially, comfortable in the hand and on the eye", while also having a bit of personality.

"I wanted them to feel approachable and usable," he said. "The inclination when designing high-performance items tends for them to be purposefully complex, and I was hoping to create something that was the opposite — intuitive and inviting."

"The three-scope construction is an obvious visual departure from other binoculars, and this encompasses the solid hinge and bridge detail, joining the dots between the three lenses," he continued. "This structure took a significant amount of time to rationalise — and manufacturing expertise to realise."

The AX Visio are designed to be repairable and able to be taken apart, which Svarovski Optik says is standard for its brand, and that future updates will be available through the companion app so that the product's life cycle will be "many years".

It also has an open programming interface and welcomes external providers to develop new functionalities for the binoculars.

The data and part of the AI model for bird identification came from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a research institute that publishes the Merlin Bird ID app. The integration into the device was handled in house at Swarovski Optik.

The binoculars were revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world's largest gadget trade fair, held yearly in Las Vegas.

Australian-born Newson is one of the world's most well known industrial designers. One of his early works, the 1990 Lockheed Lounge, is now the world's most expensive design object, and luxury items like an all-diamond ring and limited-edition samurai sword feature heavily in his oeuvre.

Among his more accessible designs are a toaster and kettle for Australian brand Sunbeam and a public toilet in Tokyo, and he is also known for working with Jony Ive at Apple.

CES 2024 takes place at various locations in Las Vegas from 9 to 12 January 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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Health tech company Withings has used the Consumer Electronics Show to unveil its BeamO "multiscope" – a device that allows people to conduct four routine medical checks at home, designed together with Elium Studio.

The small and portable device combines a contactless thermometer for measuring body temperature, an electrocardiogram (ECG) for heart rate, an oximeter for blood oxygen levels and a digital stethoscope for listening to heart and lung sounds.

Withings calls BeamO "the world's first multiscope" and says it is designed to allow people to conduct at-home check-ups or enhance their telehealth appointments with the sort of tests that a doctor would typically conduct in their office.

"BeamO will revolutionise the measurement of the core vitals carried out during medical visits from the comfort of one's own home," said Withings founder and president Eric Carreel. "This crucial data will provide a vital overview of overall health or warning signs of potential areas of concern."

"BeamO will be the thermometer of the future, providing the ability to assess temperature and observe the state of the heart and lungs," he continued.

The design and technology of BeamO is an evolution of Withings' Thermo, a no-contact infrared thermometer that came out in 2016.

BeamO carries on the rounded edges that feature in the original design but this time within a package that looks more like a compact remote control. As with all of Withings' products, it was designed together with fellow French company Elium Studio.

BeamO uses various sensors to carry out its multiple purposes, most of which work by sending out light waves and detecting how they bounce off the body.

Photoplethysmography – the technology in pulse oximeters – and electrodes along the sides of the device measure blood oxygen levels and heart rate while the user holds it in their grip.

Piezoelectric discs that convert pressure changes into electrical signals power the digital stethoscope, capturing sound waves through the back or chest. Users can listen to the audio through headphones or record and send it to their doctor via the Withings app. The app can also be used for health tracking.

Withings says there have also been improvements to the infrared thermometer since the launch of Thermo, with the latest sensor now producing a narrower focal area that gives more accurate measurements.

The company says some of the conditions and irregularities that BeamO could potentially detect include arrhythmias, abnormal heart rates, heart murmurs, lung wheezing and low blood oxygen, as well as possible fever and infection.

The vitals it measures overlap with what people are advised to monitor with Covid-19 and other respiratory infections.

"Post-pandemic, telemedicine is commonplace," said Careel. "While convenient and cost-effective, remote visits lacked the ability for health professionals to carry out the routine checks they perform in person."

"BeamO will make this possible remotely with a device that combines the functionality of four different pieces of medical equipment."

BeamO is expected to launch in Europe and Australia in summer 2024 and in the USA once it has clearance from the Food and Drug Administration.

The device was on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world's biggest tech trade show, held at the start of each year in Las Vegas. Other highlights from this year's event include LG's transparent OLED television and AI-powered robot assistant.

CES 2024 takes place at various locations in Las Vegas from 9 to 12 January 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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Materials companies Circular Matters and StoneCycling have used corn cobs – one of the world's most plentiful agricultural waste materials – to make interior cladding that is biodegradable and almost entirely bio-based.

Available in the form of tiles and sheets, CornWall is intended as a more sustainable alternative to ceramic interior wall tiles or plastic laminate.

The material is derived from more than 99 per cent renewable, biological sources, is created at low temperatures using mainly solar power and emits less carbon dioxide in its production than was captured by the corn as it grew, the manufacturers claim.

To give the products a long lifespan, Circular Matters and StoneCycling have produced the tiles with a mechanical fixing system, so they can be demounted and reused or given back to the company for cleaning and recycling.

The technology behind CornWall was invented by Circular Matters – a start-up spun out of a lab at Belgium's KU Leuven University, where founder Pieter Dondeyne and his team found a way to process plants to enhance their natural biopolymers and create durable materials.

The team then partnered with Dutch company StoneCycling to channel their technology into a product.

StoneCycling co-founder Ward Massa told Dezeen that the focus on corn came because it is one of the most grown crops on the planet and its waste is abundant.

"What happens when you grow corn for human consumption is when it's ready to harvest, you take off the corn and the corn cob is a leftover material because it doesn't hold any nutritious value," he said.

"Usually, that means that these corn cobs remain on the field and rot away, or they are burned as biomass to generate energy," he continued. "In both cases, you release the carbon that was stored in those fibres – it rots away and it gets released, or you burn it and it gets released."

With CornWall, the carbon is locked away until the tiles reach the end of their life and are left to decompose.

The production process begins with the discarded cobs being collected, dried and shredded into biomass.

This material is then mixed with other agricultural waste, binders and pigments and pressed into a plate material at a relatively low heat of 120 to 150 degrees. As a final step, the tiles are given a thin coating for water resistance.

All of the ingredients are derived from biomass apart from the pigment, which accounts for the 0.5 per cent of the product that is not bio-based – a very low percentage in a field where even products containing small amounts of materials of organic origin are sometimes labelled as bio-based.

According to Massa, the companies were able to keep the product pure by focusing on interior wall applications only.

"If you want to create a product that can also be used on the exterior or as a flooring or in the shower, then you have to start adding chemicals to bind it, to make it more water resistant and stuff like that," he said.

"We chose to start with this application because it's relatively easy and the binder and the product is nothing else than the natural polymers that are already part of this biomass. Because of adding heat and pressure, these polymers are activated and bind together."

CornWall is also biodegradable according to official standards, with Massa saying it could be buried in a field and disintegrate in a couple of months.

The only thing that would remain is the water-resistant coating, which is not biodegradable but makes up less than 0,001 per cent of the total product meaning it does not affect its biodegradability overall, according to Massa.

"Unfortunately there are no 100 per cent biodegradable coatings on the market yet," he said. "We're working with our suppliers on this but it'll take more time."

Instead, the intent is to keep the product in use for as long as possible.

The companies wants to target retail and hospitality chains that frequently open and close locations – Starbucks is an example Massa gives – and work with them to make sure the tiles stay in a closed loop of material reuse.

He also believes CornWall offers good options for these kinds of businesses in the design stage, as it can be ordered in custom colours and embossed patterns to complement their branding.

"As far as we are concerned, this will become the new retail material," said Massa. "Especially in those places in retail where they now use materials that are either glued or take a lot more energy to make or create a lot of waste when the shops are being renovated or demolished."

"Production can also be done regionally because you don't need a very complicated factory for it."

CornWall is currently available in a base range of six colours and two sizes, developed in collaboration with Dutch design practice Studio Nina van Bart. Massa says additional textures will soon be added to the line.

CornWall is the fourth product from StoneCycling. The first was the WasteBasedBrick, which is made from 60 per cent waste and was used by Dutch architects Nina Aalbers and Ferry in 't Veld of Architectuur Maken to build their own house in Rotterdam.

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The Revalu platform uses one million data points and an AI-powered accuracy checker to enable architects to compare the environmental impacts of different building materials.

Founded in Denmark and launched earlier this year, Revalu aims to cater to both large and small architecture practices, with three different ways to engage with its data platform.

First, there is the material cloud, which gathers over one million data points related to the environmental impact of different materials. This back-end Revalu product has no visual user interface; instead, it is offered to architecture firms to plug into their own software via an application programming interface (API).

This is mainly for large architecture firms using custom design tools. The material cloud provides a mapped and regularly updated dataset so that when architects create designs using their own software, they can see accurate numbers related to the projects' environmental impacts.

It saves firms from the laborious task of sourcing and comparing these scattered data points themselves, and provides what Revalu says is the most comprehensive dataset out there.

"I think by far we are the most reliable platform out there in terms of understanding all kinds of environmental indicators and also going beyond carbon," Revalu co-founder and CEO Kika Brockstedt told Dezeen.

As well as carbon emissions, Revalu's 27 mapped environmental indicators include water use, renewable energy ratio, re-used content, circularity potential and toxicity levels.

The second option for engaging with Revalu is through a front-end digital platform. This presents a free and pared-down selection of indicators in the form of a material data library.

This platform allows users to set up a project for a new building, select materials for it, compare the data and see a preliminary lifecycle analysis, with the Danish carbon emissions upper limit of 12 kilograms of CO2 per square metre per year as a benchmark.

The interface provides an easy way to visualise the impact of material choices while also being a useful communication tool in meetings with clients.

With the platform, Brockstedt hopes to make more information available to solo practitioners and small firms, who she notes are usually at a disadvantage in not having access to the in-house sustainability experts and sophisticated custom software that large firms have.

She describes "a slight monopolisation happening" over sustainability in architecture, with small firms falling "very far behind".

"The vision is to really make climate targets tangible for the industry and to ensure that people are able to make shifts very fast," said Brockstedt. "At the same time, we want to democratise the data and the access to it."

A third, just-launched facet of Revalu is also intended to broaden access to information, this time by spreading awareness of new low-carbon materials.

Called the Material Innovation Hub, this section of the digital platform is curated by Revalu and showcases bio-based and recycled materials such as eelgrass, straw bales, hemp, mycelium and certain types of timber.

Brockstedt cites a partner project undertaken with UK studio DaeWha Kang Design as an example of the kind of benefits it wants to bring to small firms.

The architects used Revalu's platform to find several alternative materials for their renovation of St Andrew Holborn church in London, a Grade I-listed building by architect Christopher Wren, hoping to bring the embodied carbon for the project down enough to qualify it for awards. The project has since been shortlisted in the Architects Journal Awards.

Revalu's platform is powered by artificial intelligence — first, a machine learning algorithm that pulls and processes data from Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and other sustainability reports, then a second "reliability engine" that runs quality checks and flags potentially incorrect numbers for follow-up.

The company's primary market is Europe due to the region's strong product data and regulations, but Brockstedt says that they are increasingly finding it possible to serve the rest of the world by adapting the data using existing methodologies and averages.

While her time building Revalu has taught her about the importance of championing bio-based and alternative materials, she says she has also come to see that sustainable architecture "is not black and white".

"Many like to preach: concrete is bad and wood is good," she said. "I actually think concrete is a great material and often makes more sense than building wood skyscrapers in a desert."

"It's about diversifying, and combining materials in a smart way, where it makes the most sense. And longevity, to ensure that the building is there to stay."

Diversification is also key when it comes to biomaterials, she added.

"We cannot rely on wood, so fast-growing materials such as bamboo, straw and hemp will be crucial materials in the future," she said. "This is why retrofitting existing buildings with bio-based materials can be a great form of carbon sink."

Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on the planet, while straw is an agricultural byproduct that can be used as insulation.

Hemp is also fast growing and was found to be "more effective than trees" at sequestering carbon by Cambridge University.

Photos are courtesy of Revalu.

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Australia has become the first country in the world to ban engineered stone, following rising cases of silicosis among workers who handle the material.

The ban was agreed at a meeting of Australian federal and state workplace ministers on Wednesday, and will come into place across the country from 1 July 2024.

The ban targets engineered stone, also known as agglomerated stone – a type of material made by mixing crushed stone with a resin binder.

"This is a dangerous product"

While it is valued as a durable and affordable alternative to natural stone for kitchen benchtops, the material can be dangerous while being cut because it releases a fine silica dust into the air.

Australia has recorded rising cases of the lung disease silicosis in stonemasons who have handled the product, leading it to be dubbed "the asbestos of the 2020s" by union leader Zach Smith.

"This is a dangerous product that's known to cause the potentially fatal disease silicosis, and it has no place in our workplaces," said Queensland industrial relations minister Grace Grace in a statement following the meeting.

"The rate of silicosis illness in Australia for those working with engineered stone is unacceptable," said her Western Australian counterpart Simone McGurk. "This prohibition will ensure future generations of workers are protected from silicosis associated with working with engineered stone."

Ban follows report finding no safe level of silica in engineered stone

The move comes nine months after an investigation by three Australian news outlets accused supplier Caesarstone of not doing enough to warn people of the dangers of working with the material and the country's construction union launched a campaign calling for the ban.

A subsequent report by the national policy body Safe Work Australia found that engineered stone workers were significantly over-represented in silicosis cases and were being diagnosed with the disease at much younger ages than workers from other industries, with most being under the age of 35.

It also found that the risk from engineered stone was distinct from that of natural stone due to the material's physical and chemical composition, and that this was likely contributing to more rapid and severe disease.

The report concluded that no level of silica was safe in engineered stone and that the material should be prohibited in its entirety.

Silicosis is caused by tiny particles of silica becoming embedded in the lining of the lungs and manifests in symptoms such as shortness of breath, cough, weakness and fatigue.

The condition is life-altering and potentially fatal, with many formerly healthy young sufferers describing being unable to work or play with their kids.

Caesarstone commits to supplying Australia with "alternative products"

In response to news of the ban, Caesarstone commented that while it disagreed with the decision, it is taking the necessary steps to ensure supply of alternative materials to Australian consumers.

"The Caesarstone brand is well known in Australia and its products have earned tremendous success over the years," said Caesarstone CEO Yos Shiran. "We are already taking steps to supply our Australian market with alternative products while maintaining our strong market presence."

It has previously argued that its material is safe if handled correctly and that the silicosis danger was the fault of employers and work safety bodies.

Other companies including Ikea and Bunnings had already committed to phasing out the material in the Australian market.

The ban will apply to the manufacturing, supplying, processing and installing of engineered stone but not its removal, repair, disposal or minor modifications.

Australia's workplace ministers will meet again in March 2024 to finalise details of the ban, including the transition period for contracts that have already been implemented and the precise definition of engineered stone.

The country's Model Work Health and Safety Regulations currently exclude concrete and cement products, bricks and pavers, porcelain, ceramic tiles, roof tiles, grout, mortar and render, and plasterboard from the definition of engineered stone, but ministers have indicated that additional products would be added to the exemptions.

This may allow future engineered stone products to be exempted from the ban if there is "compelling evidence" that they can be used safely.

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A phone charger for rough sleepers, a basketball that never goes flat and glasses that instantly change prescription are among this year's top product designs, which we've rounded up as part of our review of 2023.

This is a year that saw designers turn their attention to solving some of the world's most pressing problems, from the rise of climate change-linked disasters to waste pollution from single-use items and the energy expenditure of buildings.

Others have brought style to solar-powered devices and accessibility to overlooked everyday objects.

Read on for Dezeen's top 10 product designs of 2023:

MyPowerbank by Luke Talbot

Created by designer Luke Talbot during his studies at Central Saint Martins, MyPowerbank is a prototype portable charger that can be hooked up to rental bikes to allow people experiencing homelessness to charge their phones for free.

The charger was designed to slot onto London's rental cycles, taking advantage of the fact that, without having to pay to hire it, the bike's chain moves when pedalling backwards, turning into a tiny generator.

Find out more about MyPowerbank ›

Bottlecup by Seymourpowell

Bottlecup founders Kate and Mark Arnell tasked multidisciplinary agency Seymourpowell with helping them design a single item that could replace both disposable water bottles and coffee cups.

The resulting product features a stainless steel water bottle that slots inside a vacuum-insulated cup, while the cup's lid can be stored in the base when not in use.

Find out more about Bottlecup ›

PulpaTronics RFID tags

Created by a group of design graduates from London's Royal College of Art, the PulpaTronics RFID tag is entirely made of paper, with a conductive circuit marked into it by laser.

The goal is to replace the billions of RFID tags currently used by the retail industry each year and made with metal and silicon components that prevent the tags from being recycled. The prototype design was the winner of sustainable design (consumer) of the year in the 2023 Dezeen Awards.

Find out more about PulpaTronics RFID tags ›

Airless basketball by Wilson

Following in the footsteps of airless tyres, Wilson's 3D-printed basketball does not need to be inflated and instead gets its bounce from its lattice structure, made of elastomeric polymer.

The ball is currently a prototype and Wilson is undertaking further research before releasing it as a product, at which point players won't have to worry about having their ball go flat or getting an air pump.

Find out more about Wilson's airless basketball ›

32°N adaptive focus sunglasses by DeepOptics

Another Dezeen Awards winner, this time in the product design (consumer design and wearables) category, the 32°N sunglasses feature a technology called pixelated liquid crystal (LC) lenses that allows the prescription of the lenses to be electronically controlled.

The innovation has several potential applications, but it is first being used on these adaptive focus sunglasses, where a reading prescription is activated with a swipe on the side of the frame.

Find out more about 32°N sunglasses ›

Sunne light by Marjan van Aubel

Made by designer Marjan van Aubel for Dutch lighting brand Sunne, this light is designed for suspension in front of a window, where it draws all its power from solar energy.

The linear shape is informed by the appearance of a horizon and it glows with coloured light in a choice of settings that mimic sunlight at different times of the day.

Find out more about Sunne ›

Water-Filled Glass

Start-up Water-Filled Glass makes panes of glass filled with water to harness sunlight for heating and cooling. The warmed water is pumped through sealed pipes to warm colder areas of the building, while the glass also limits solar heat gain.

The innovation saves energy and potentially allows buildings to be heavily glazed without significantly compromising their sustainability.

Find out more about Water-Filled Glass ›

Lemmo One bike by Lemmo and Springtime Design

Lemmo One is both an electric bike and a conventional mechanical bike, with the conversion achieved via a removable battery pack that attaches to the frame and a hub motor on the back wheel that can be disengaged so as not to block normal pedalling.

The design gives Lemmo One a longer potential lifespan than e-bikes tend to have due to failures of their electronic parts.

Find out more about Lemmo One ›

Accessories toothbrush handles by Landor & Fitch

Designed to be not just accessible but desirable, the Accessories handles are intended to make toothbrushing less painful for people with limited dexterity.

Each customer is matched to their ideal handle based on an online questionnaire that asks them to consider what household objects they find easiest to grip, and the product is then 3D-printed on request, maximising personalisation and minimising waste.

Find out more about Accessories ›

ForestGuard wildfire alarm

The ForestGuard system uses sensors and satellites to detect wildfires in their very earliest stages, helping to fight a type of natural hazard that is being exacerbated by climate change.

The company can also use data from the sensors to predict fires before they start, giving firefighters the chance to carry out preventative measures. The winner of the James Dyson Award in Turkey, ForestGuard was created by a group of recent design graduates and is already on the market.

Find out more about ForestGuard ›

2023 review

This article is part of Dezeen's roundup of the biggest and best news and projects in architecture, design, interior design and technology from 2023.

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Sportswear brand Puma has said it is a step closer to launching a truly biodegradable shoe, following a trial in which a specially made version of its Suede sneakers decomposed under strict conditions.

In the Re:Suede experiment, 500 shoes were sent out to testers for six months of wear. Of those shoes, 412 were returned to Puma and sent to an industrial composting facility in The Netherlands, where they were mixed with other green waste and left to biodegrade.

After around three and a half months, a large proportion of the leather trainer had broken down sufficiently to be sold in The Netherlands as Grade A compost – a high-quality compost typically used on gardens and landscapes.

Slowing things down was the sole, which in the Re:Suedes was made of thermoplastic elastomer (TPE-E), a type of rubber. It took longer than the other components to break down into small enough pieces to be classified as compost, around six months.

Puma is calling the Re:Suede experiment "successful" – with caveats. The longer timeframe required for the soles to break down is a deviation from standard operating procedures for industrial composting, so the shoes could not just be thrown into a household food waste collection.

However, Puma is hoping to launch a commercial version of the sneaker next year, incorporating a takeback scheme that would see it compost the shoe using its tailor-made process.

"While the Re:Suede could not be processed under the standard operating procedures for industrial composting, the shoes did eventually turn into compost," said Puma chief sourcing officer Anne-Laure Descours.

"We will continue to innovate with our partners to determine the infrastructure and technologies needed to make the process viable for a commercial version of the Re:Suede, including a takeback scheme, in 2024."

In a report of the experiment's findings, Puma said it would pursue a "new business model in composting" that could support the decomposition of the shoe.

"The soles slow the process down, resulting in more composting cycles required to turn the shoe into Grade A compost, meaning they can't be processed using today's standard industrial composting operating procedures," said the report.

"But with a new business model in composting and a higher volume of input into it, those standard operating procedures can change," the report concluded. "There is a future for Re:Suede. To get there, we need more scale."

Puma's Re:Suede shoe is made of Zeology suede, which is tanned using a process based on zeolite minerals and free of chrome, aldehyde and heavy metals. Padding and laces are made of hemp, while the lining is made of a hemp-cotton blend.

For the composting process, Puma partnered with Dutch waste company Ortessa. The procedure involved shredding the shoe and placing the pieces into a composting tunnel – a unit where the temperature, humidity and oxygen levels are kept at optimal levels for bacteria to break down organic matter.

For the decomposing shoe granules to be considered small enough for compost, they had to be under 10 millimetres in size.

Those granules were periodically filtered out and sold as compost in The Netherlands.

The leftover pieces, 10 to 40 millimetres in size, became part of the "compost starter mix" and were combined with more green waste to continue decomposing. Ortessa estimated that the full shoe was turned into compost within approximately six months.

Re:Suede is Puma's second attempt at launching a compostable shoe, with the first coming over a decade ago in the form of 2012's InCycle collection.

Its Basket sneaker, which Puma said was fully compostable through industrial composting, was made of organic cotton and linen with a sole composed of a biodegradable plastic called APINATbio. The range was discontinued in 2014 and its failure blamed on poor consumer demand.

While several shoe designs have been marketed as biodegradable in recent years, the strict conditions required for them to actually break down are often not specified or the infrastructure not available. This can be seen as a kind of greenwashing.

Brands that have launched footwear described as biodegradable include Bottega Veneta with its sugarcane and coffee boots and Adidas with the uppers of its Futurecraft trainers.

A more experimental composition came from German designer Emilie Burfeind, whose compostable sneakers are made with a mushroom mycelium sole and a canine hair upper.

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Dutch company Human Material Loop is using an unusual waste source to make a zero-carbon wool alternative that requires no land or water use: human hair.

Human Material Loop works with participating hairdressers to collect hair cuttings, which it processes into yarns and textiles and sometimes turns into garments.

Founder and CEO Zsofia Kollar was initially interested in human hair from what she describes as a "cultural and sociological" perspective before she began exploring its material properties.

"Delving into scientific studies about hair revealed not only its unique characteristics but also the stark reality of excessive waste generated," Kollar told Dezeen. "This realisation became a catalyst for a clear mission: finding sustainable ways to utilise hair waste."

Elsewhere, human hair mats are being used to mop up oil spills and to create biodegradable stools, but Kollar honed in on the textile industry as the best target for her aspirations.

"Not only is the textile sector one of the largest markets in our economy, but it also ranks among the most environmentally taxing industries," said Kollar.

"Throughout history, we've utilised a variety of animal fibres in textiles, yet our own hair, composed of the same keratin protein as wool, often goes overlooked," she continued. "Why not treat human hair as we would any other valuable textile fibre?"

According to Kollar, the use of human hair eliminates one of the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the textile industry: the cultivation of raw materials like cotton plants or farming of sheep for wool.

Waste hair does not degrade any soil, require any pesticide, pollute any water or produce any greenhouse gas emissions, she points out.

At the same time, hair has properties that make it highly desirable. It's flexible, it has high tensile strength, it functions as a thermal insulator and it doesn't irritate the skin.

Human Material Loop has focused on developing the technology to process hair so it can be integrated into standard machinery for yarn and textile production.

The company has made the waste hair into a staple fibre yarn – a type of yarn made by twisting short lengths of fibres together – and has several textiles in development.

It has also made a few complete garments, most recently a red sweater-like dress created in collaboration with the company Henkel, owner of the Schwartzkopf haircare brand.

The dress is intended for display at hairdressing events, as part of an initiative to foster discussion about alternative salon waste-management ideas.

Seeing completed products like these, Kollar said, helps to ease the discomfort or disgust that many people feel around using products derived from humans.

"Surprisingly, the material looks utterly ordinary, akin to any other textile," she said. "A fascinating transformation occurs when individuals touch and feel the fabric. Their initial scepticism dissolves, giving way to a subconscious acceptance of the material."

"The rejection usually stems from those who've merely heard about it without ever laying eyes on the garments themselves," she continued. "It's a testament to the power of firsthand experience in reshaping perceptions"

Kollar says Human Material Loop will also be targeting the architecture and interiors products market, for which she believes hair's moisture resistance, antibacterial properties, and acoustic and thermal attributes will make it an attractive proposition.

The company has a commercial pilot scheduled for 2024 and also aims to create a comprehensive fabric library for brands and designers.

Kollar had been making experimental textiles like a golden, scented tapestry woven from blonde hair for many years before setting out to commercialise the venture with Human Material Loop in 2021.

She is not the only designer to have attempted to utilise wasted hair cuttings. In recent years, Ellie Birkhead incorporated the material into region-specific bricks and hair was used to measure urban pollution in Bangkok.

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The process of using bacteria to colour textiles has been brought to a commercial scale by British company Colorifix, which hopes to cut the fashion industry's use of toxic chemical dyes.

Shortlisted for a 2023 Dezeen Award, Colorifix has brought several pigments to market since its founding in 2016 including indigos, mauves, pastels and beiges – all made by bacteria that was genetically engineered to produce certain colour-making enzymes.

The company was started by two synthetic biologists, Orr Yarkoni and Jim Ajioka, after travelling to rural Nepal to develop biological sensors for monitoring heavy metal contamination in the local drinking water.

Appalled to learn that the pollution was caused by waste from the textile dying industry, which was leaking into the river, the two set out to see if they could create a non-toxic alternative to synthetic dyes using their knowledge of engineering microbes.

"We knew we could make colours in bacteria but it was [about] trying to figure out how you could get the colour onto textiles in an efficient manner and using biology to do so," Ajioka told Dezeen.

"When you look at any commodity product, you have to be very, very cost-efficient because otherwise, you're never going to enter the market."

Ajioka hopes to make the company's colouring process cost-competitive with ubiquitous petrochemical dyes.

"Sustainability isn't just about having a great idea," he said. "It's also whether you can scale it and make it into something that will be acceptable to the current market."

Bacterial dyeing makes use of processes, in which the organisms are naturally inclined to engage, according to Ajioka. He suggests looking to the bathroom for an example.

"You will see probably at some point some red stuff growing in your grout and your tiles in your shower," he said. "That's what we do. We engineer bacteria to make colours and they naturally will fix onto surfaces and secrete and deposit the colour onto the surface."

The colours made by Colorifix's bacteria, however, are not their own. Instead, the company uses a DNA database to identify which enzymes are responsible for the natural colour of different plants and animals.

Colorifix's scientists then modify the bacteria with those DNA sequences so they will produce the enzymes themselves.

The bacteria are left to multiply in a liquid culture in bioreactors – "basically fancy beer fermenters", according to Ajioka.

The contents of these tanks are then transferred to a standard dye machine where – given bacteria's preference for clinging to surfaces rather than floating in liquid – they will easily transfer to the yarn or fabric inside, spreading out to produce an even colour.

The bacteria is killed through the application of heat, which also helps to fix the colour.

According to Colorifix, its process eliminates some of the environmental issues associated with dyeing while significantly reducing others.

Compared to conventional dyeing, the process uses 80 per cent less chemicals, 77 per cent less water and produces 31 per cent fewer carbon dioxide emissions, the company claims.

Colorifix has seven pigments in its catalogue so far, with some capable of making multiple colours by tweaking the fermentation or dyeing process.

Pigment 01 can be found in and around geysers, but the team searched for an organism that could produce the same colour in non-extreme conditions and found a perfect underwater bacterium, whose DNA it used as a template. The company can make four different colours using this one pigment by tweaking the pH levels in the fermenters.

There is also Pigment 03, based on a red bacteria that grows on bread – and was thought in medieval times to signify a miracle – as well as the beige-ish Pigment 05, which is essentially melanin, and the lilac-toned Pigment 06, derived from a plant long used as a textile dye in Asia.

"Buying" a pigment is not straightforward, however. The colour a pigment produces on a piece of fabric is dependent on the process, feedstock and environment, so to offer a consistent product, Colorifix operates a hybrid model.

Dye houses license the technology and buy the company's specialised hardware and equipment. Colorifix currently licenses to three dye houses across Europe, which in turn supply fashion brands.

Fabrics dyed with Colorifix's pigments have already started being used by early adopters such as mega-retailer H&M and experimental clothing brand Vollebak, which used a colour based on the enzymes of the indigo plant to produce its DNA T-shirt.

However, Ajioka is keen to stress that even with wide adoption, Colorifix's innovations won't make the fashion industry environmentally friendly.

"The global fashion industry is unsustainable and technology alone will not fix the problem," said Ajioka. "We need a cultural shift towards being more thoughtful about what we wear, extending the life of our clothes and ultimately buying less."

The company has been shortlisted in the material innovation category of the Dezeen Awards, together with its partner the Mills Fabrica Investment Fund.

Bacterial dyeing is also being pioneered by the lifestyle brand Normal Phenomena of Life, which is entirely dedicated to bio-design. Others, such as Danish fashion brand Ganni, are using the organisms to grow an all-natural leather alternative known as bacterial cellulose.

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A new design trend prioritises the needs of bugs and animals above human beings. Rima Sabina Aouf finds out if "interspecies design" is the next step in creating more sustainable spaces and objects.

An exhibition designed to invite in animals, a garden optimised for the senses of pollinators rather than humans and architecture designed with nooks in which birds and insects can nestle form part of the novel approach.

"This is a subject that we have been more and more interested in," the co-founder of London design practice Blast Studio Paola Garnousset told Dezeen.

Blast Studio started out by making 3D-printed structures from waste coffee cups where mycelium – the filamentous part of fungus that has applications as an architectural and design material – could grow.

But as the designers gradually optimised their designs with more folds and interstices that would meet the organism's preference for darkness and humidity, they found themselves thinking about other species as well.

The studio is now working on an outdoor pavilion whose intricately structured columns will accommodate ladybirds, bees and birds.

"The 3D printing techniques that we use give us the possibility to create artefacts that are designed both at the micro scale of fungi and insects and the macro scale of human beings," said Garnousset.

Interspecies design about "changing our level of respect" for other creatures

London's Serpentine Gallery has hosted two projects that centred interspecies approaches in the last two years.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Pollinator Pathmaker is an artificial-intelligence-powered tool that designs gardens to be as appealing as possible for bees and other pollinators, while Tomas Saraceno's Web(s) of Life exhibition involved making several changes to the building so it would be welcoming for the animals and insects of the surrounding park.

Ginsberg considers the interspecies approach to be an attempt to create with empathy for other lifeforms. She came to it after spending several years researching the idea of what it means to make life "better".

"Exploring how other species experience the world and – in the case of Pollinator Pathmaker – how they experience the things that humans create, opens up a world filled with empathy," said Ginsberg.

"We need to think beyond sustainability towards prioritising the natural world."

MoMA's senior curator of architecture and design Paola Antonelli has also developed an interest in interspecies design. She suspects the approach has a "very long history" but that it is reemerging in the West in line with the recuperation of indigenous knowledge and the rise of the rights of nature movement, which involves granting legal personhood to entities like rivers and mountains.

"I think that we get closest to real interspecies design when we think like that," Antonelli told Dezeen. "When we change our level of respect and communication and really try to position ourselves in a different way, not as colonisers but rather as partners."

A "process" towards the impossible

True interspecies design, as Antonelli sees it, may be impossible since human designers have a fundamentally human-centric view of the world.

But Antonelli considers the term a useful umbrella for a range of works that call for an "unlearning and learning process", dismantling the hierarchy that humans uphold between ourselves and other species.

Her version of the canon includes earlier works that attempt to find "a common language" with animals, like Sputniko!'s Crowbot Jenny, for which the designer, scientist and polymath created an instrument in order to communicate with crows.

Then there is Thomas Thwaites' GoatMan project, for which the designer spent three days living as a goat.

While Thwaites told Dezeen he doesn't consider GoatMan to be a true work of interspecies design – "the impetus of GoatMan was my desire to have a holiday from being a human, so pretty selfish" – he does see the connection.

"Goatman was definitely intended to contribute to a shift in how we think of non-human creatures," he said. "Goats are just as highly evolved as humans – there's no hierarchy."

"I feel that interspecies design is a process," said Antonelli. "That it goes from designing for animals to designing with animals to – what's the next step? Enabling animals to design for themselves?

"That would be the real gesture, right? If we were able to actually let go of the tools of production. That's what I would like to see at some point."

The thorny status of biodesign

A practice of creating together with organisms as they conduct their natural processes, known as biodesign, is emerging. It includes making mycelium bricks or bacteria-produced textiles.

These objects are created by human and non-human actors together, but different projects treat their creature-collaborators in varying ways.

Antontelli considers Neri Oxman's Silk Pavilions, a biodesign project created in collaboration with silkworms, as one of the closest examples yet to a true work of interspecies design.

Oxman studied silkworm behaviour in detail for the work and ended up finding a way to encourage the caterpillars to lay down their silk in sheets rather than cocoons, creating unusual structures.

In contrast to traditional silk harvesting, the silkworms are not killed during this process but instead caught safely as they metamorphose and left to carry on living.

This level of care and symbiosis make the Silk Pavilions stand out as works of interspecies design, even if, in fact, we can't know for sure that the silkworms are happy with this arrangement.

Curator Lucia Pietroiusti, who is head of ecologies at the Serpentine Gallery where Saraceno and Ginsberg's works were presented, thinks the area of biodesign distils a key tension in the budding practice of interspecies design.

"Many completely legitimate, genuine and compassionate attempts to design with more-than-humans at heart also exist within capitalist consumerism, within a chain of production," she said.

"No matter how you slice it, making more of something new is always going to be making more of something."

And what is ultimately good for other species is probably that we make as little as possible.

A new look for sustainability

While it can be tempting to conclude that the best design for other species is no design at all, that downplays the role that projects like these can play in changing the way we think about production.

Pietroiusti sees interspecies design as part of an evolution of the idea of sustainability towards something more like "thrivability", where we design for the planet to thrive, not just survive.

"Sustainability as a notion has been in too close a contact with zero-sum principles – this is sustainable because I do it and then I do something else to offset it," she said. "In the maths of the planet, that is very rarely the case."

"Are there situations in which certain projects or initiatives can think more ambitiously than sustainability or than reducing harm, and into 'can we leave things actually better than they were before?'"

Seven years on from GoatMan, Thwaites believes that while the real shifts to recognise and protect non-human creatures need to come at the legislative level, design can contribute commentary and explore how the change might materialise.

"I hope people will one day look back once the cultural shift has happened and wonder at how we didn't have interspecies design," he said. "Like smoking in pubs and all the more important social shifts that have taken place over the decades."

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A person can change the prescription of their eyewear with a quick swipe with the 32°N sunglasses by technology company DeepOptics.

The adaptive focus sunglasses use a technology that DeepOptics calls pixelated liquid crystal (LC) lenses.

These lenses contain thousands of pixels, which in this case refers to tiny electronic controls that change the optical properties of the glasses.

The new technology can have many applications, but with its first product, the Israeli company is targetting people with presbyopia — a condition that affects everyone as they age, making it progressively harder to focus on objects up close.

Whereas usually affected people would face switching between two pairs of glasses while outside — one pair of sunglasses and one pair of reading glasses — with 32°N, they only need to swipe the arm of the frame near their temple to trigger a change in the lens.

"With dynamic lenses, the lenses can dynamically change their prescription — their optical power — to correct for different distances," DeepOptics CEO and co-founder Yariv Haddad told Dezeen.

He explained that while there are other technologies out there for dynamic focusing optics, almost none of them are suitable for eyeglasses because they rely on moving parts.

"Liquid Crystal is a material that can change its optical characteristics electronically, without moving or changing its shape, and is therefore critical for enabling this new generation of adaptive eye glasses," he said.

He said the technology adds almost no weight or bulk to the glasses, and has the added advantage of being updatable with new magnification profiles over time.

With presbyopia, a person's prescription increases gradually until it stabilises around the age of 65 to 70, meaning that they would usually go through several pairs of glasses, but the prescription for the 32°N sunglasses is set via an accompanying app and can be updated later on as needed.

This feature should enable the 32°N glasses to stay in use for longer than many regular eyeglasses, even though the addition of electronics often shortens an object's lifespan.

The secret to the technology is the liquid crystal lens, which Haddad says is designed and built similarly to a transparent version of the liquid crystal display (LCD) screens used in TVs and smartphones, and features a liquid crystal layer on top of a matrix of pixels.

"These pixels are actually tiny electronical controls that apply local voltage to the liquid crystal layer that in turn, changes its refractive index," said Haddad.

"When powered, they generate a very precise and complex 2D voltage profile that resembles a shape of a lens, and affects the liquid crystal differently at every point."

Haddad says the pixels can be thought of as "drawing" the shape of the lens on the liquid crystal layer, with different small voltages determining the instruction they give.

A small processor, battery and Bluetooth chip are embedded in the injected polymer frame to make the product work, with only a small amount of power required to activate the adaptive focus lenses.

The 32°N sunglasses are shortlisted in this year's Dezeen Awards. DeepOptics next plans to bring the LC lens technology to eyeglasses for people with myopia as well as presbyopia, so they can toggle between their far-sight and reading prescriptions.

People often wear bifocal or progressive lenses in this instance, but those can have their drawbacks as they divide the lens into different sections for multiple uses.

The company is also working on a model that switches modes automatically rather than manually, using data from eye-tracking sensors in the glasses frame to gauge whether the wearer is looking at something close up or in the distance.

Other recent innovations in eyewear have included smart glasses for streaming video anywhere by Viture and frames specifically designed to fit Black faces by Reframd.

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The increasing need to protect cities from environmental hazards is a chance to transform communities for the better, says Rebuild By Design managing director Amy Chester in this interview for our Designing for Disaster series.

Rebuild by Design began in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in New York as a competition run by the US government to instigate projects that would ready the region for future extreme weather events.

A decade later, the now independent nonprofit works with municipalities around the world on climate resilience and is sought after for the community-rooted approach that it pioneered in the Hurricane Sandy Design Competition.

"We don't come with any answers"

The organisation's collaborative working process, which engages a wide range of stakeholders, is "definitely a big piece" of what makes Rebuild by Design unique, says Chester, who has been managing the organisation from the beginning.

"The second one is that we don't come with any answers," she added. "We come with questions and we research everything together."

In the Hurricane Sandy Design Competition, that meant that entrants didn't pitch a project or a vision. Instead, they pitched themselves as teams of professionals from various backgrounds.

From 150 international applicants, 10 groups were chosen to participate in a collaborative research phase, which involved touring the Sandy-affected region, meeting affected people and eventually presenting multiple concepts for interventions that could make a difference in the face of future climate events like flooding and hurricanes. Selected architecture firms included OMA, BIG and WXY.

Ten of their concepts, one per team, were selected by a jury for funding and gradually developed into fully fleshed-out projects, again using collaborative approaches like workshops and community outreach events.

"We kind of turned transparency on its head by inviting those most involved to the table from the very beginning, to actually create the table together," said Chester.

Collaboration and transparency are not just buzzwords for Chester. She advocates for more genuine candour in communication between governments and their citizens in the face of climate change.

"Every single city has to understand what their own risks are and really have conversations with the population about how much risk are we willing to take on," she said. "You can completely fortify your city and say, 'We don't want any risk', or you can say 'hey, you know what, it's okay if we flood six inches, or two inches, or a foot, or whatever it might be'."

"Then you can design your adaptation practices to meet that risk," she continued. "If you don't have those conversations out in the open, then communities just feel that their government will protect them 100 per cent and they're floored anytime that there's a climate event and something happens to their homes and their livelihoods."

Best climate-resilience projects "help us on wet days and dry days"

Projects to have come out of Rebuild by Design include Scape's 2023 Obel Award-winning Living Breakwaters coastal defence system, which helps calm the water around Staten Island while fostering marine life, and BIG's Big U, a horseshoe of raised parkland, floodwalls, berms and sewer system upgrades encircling lower Manhattan.

For Chester, the most important climate-resilience projects are situated on a community level not an individual building level, and improve public space as much as they protect people from the elements.

"If we're doing it on a community scale that means that everybody is participating, everybody is excited about the outcome, and you are creating interventions that aren't only for climate change — they can also be enhancements to public space," said Chester.

Her favourite example of a place that has done this well is the city of Hoboken, across the river from New York City in New Jersey.

There, the Rebuild by Design-funded project titled Resist, Delay, Store and Discharge, by OMA, complements the city's plans to build a series of interconnected resiliency parks to store stormwater, three of which are now open and the last of which is under construction.

The interventions have not only helped alleviate flooding in the city, which is mostly built on a flood plain, but they have delivered on community requests for infrastructure like safer pedestrian crossings and bike lanes. The improvements are credited with cutting the pedestrian death toll down to zero for four years running.

"Ten years ago, I would have never said that a landscape architect is on the frontlines of climate change, but they really are," said Chester. "And so are architects."

"It's really about leveraging the opportunity that we have at this moment to rethink our communities and do it in a way that will help us on wet days and dry days and everything in between."

Most current building still "something that we're going to have to fix later"

Chester still sees many flaws in planning and design for disaster prevention. There's a failure to consider heatwaves — what Chester calls "the silent killer from climate" — as a natural hazard in the US, which means mitigation is underfunded, while too many developments are being built without measures to protect them from events like flooding, because they're not seen as being at risk.

Homes in recognised floodplains are built to set standards, said Chester, but those standards are based on the frequency and intensity of events in the past, not predictions of what is to come in the future. And homes outside of those areas may have no adaptations, even though they are vulnerable.

"When we aren't creating something that is thinking about the future, we are creating something that we're going to have to fix later," Chester said. "Already 50 per cent of all floods happen outside of a floodplain."

On the positive side, she considers that the last two years have brought a change in how disaster relief and prevention is understood in the USA, with a shared understanding that events are on the increase.

"There's just something about the past two years that feels very, very different," said Chester, citing the passing of the Environmental Bond Act by voters in New York in 2022, making US$4.2 billion in funding available for climate-resilience projects, as a key moment.

And although she is worried that recent rhetoric from the UK government "that decarbonisation costs too much", marked by a U-turn on net-zero targets, is about to be replicated across the Atlantic, for now she considers there is unity in the US on at least the question of adaptation.

"Republicans may use the word weather and Democrats may use the word climate, but we're talking about the same thing," she said. "Everybody's communities are suffering and everyone is experiencing it."

The photography is courtesy of Rebuild by Design.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

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Wildfires can be detected before they spread or even before they start using a new satellite-enabled sensor system created by a group of Turkish recent design graduates and spotlighted by Dezeen as part of our Designing for Disaster series.

Like an Internet of Things for woodland, ForestGuard is a system of sensors that is fitted to trees to detect changes in the air and alert the local authorities if a fire is present.

Only one sensor is required for every 16 hectares of forest — or around 16,000 trees — and the system can distinguish between different types of emissions, such as that from a wildfire versus a cigarette or car exhaust, to avoid false positives.

ForestGuard chief technology officer Suat Batuhan Esirger told Dezeen that the product reduces the amount of time it takes for firefighters to be notified of a fire from an average of 90 minutes to just 15.

In a recent example, it allowed the firefighters of the Turkish archipelago of Princes' Islands to extinguish a wildfire when it had only burned through an area of land around the size of a dining table.

"It was the middle of the night, there was nobody passing by, nobody to report on the fire until it got a lot bigger than when we detected it," said Esirger. "That was a huge win for us, seeing it in action."

Esirger and the other members of the ForestGuard team — Ecem Ertan, Onur Sertgil and Rana Imam Esirger, students of İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi — began work on the invention after the devastating 2021 Turkey wildfires, for which they all provided volunteer assistance.

Esirger aided the search-and-rescue effort as a drone pilot, which he says allowed him to see the whole process from end-to-end and start thinking about what could be done better.

Around the world, wildfire detection is currently managed through a mix of drones, satellites and thermal imaging — all options that have their drawbacks, chiefly that they are restricted to looking above the treetops.

"We focused on the phrase, 'what if the trees themselves notify us'," said Esirger. "We approached it like a smartwatch; let's monitor the air in the forest below the tree line. So if something abnormal happens, we will know about it."

The system they came up with measures and analyses temperature, humidity, air pressure and the levels of various gases to identify the presence of a fire, with trained machine-learning algorithms to differentiate between wildfire smoke and other kinds of emissions.

Their initial design used a low-power terrestrial network called LoRa to connect the sensors to the internet, but they've since switched to satellite connectivity provided by American company EchoStar.

The change makes the system "disaster-proof", claims Esirger, whereas some of the older LoRa devices were sent offline when earthquakes hit Turkey in 2023.

Other measures also add to the ForestGuard sensors' resilience. Their power comes from a solar panel with a long-lasting supercapacitor for energy storage and they're equipped with anti-theft mechanisms.

They are also made of engineered plastics that can withstand ultraviolet light exposure, animal interference and temperatures of up to 1,500°C, meaning they will survive for part but not all of a forestfire.

"We made it fire retardant as much as possible, so they will continue sending data until their last breath," said Esirger. "From that data we can predict the spread direction of that wildfire, so we can feed that data to the authorities and they can fight fire more efficiently."

ForestGuard's algorithms also allow for something perhaps even more useful than a faster disaster response: prevention.

Using the data collected through the sensors, ForestGuard can tell when the conditions are such that a fire is likely, giving firefighters the opportunity to carry out measures such as cleaning out dried brush or preventatively spraying water.

Since the wildfire in August, the firefighters at Princes Islands have been following these warnings and not had any further incidents, said Esirger.

According to ForestGuard, the system can protect 500 trees for US$1 a year, assuming the devices remain in place for five years.

ForestGuard won the Turkish heats of the James Dyson Award 2023 and is now up against regional winners from around the world in the international competition, with the winner set to be revealed on 15 November.

The product is further along in its development than most others in the contest, with devices already on sale in Turkey and ForestGuard looking to expand into markets including France, Australia and the USA in the coming months.

Esirger hopes that the invention will be seen not just as a tool to fight fires on a regional level but as part of a united, global battle to minimise the impacts of climate change. Here, wildfires form a "vicious cycle", he said, that is often underappreciated.

"Forest fires emit carbon dioxide," said Esirger. "Carbon dioxide causes global warming. Global warming causes a lot more wildfires. So it just feeds itself. We are trying to minimise this increase."

Reflecting on the exacerbation of wildfires by climate change earlier this year, GGA+ architecture studio partner Greg Kochanowski said that the design professions were not doing enough to address the problem of wildfires.

"What is needed is a new holistic, synthesised, design discipline" fusing multiple areas of expertise, he wrote.

The photography is courtesy of ForestGuard.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

The post "The trees themselves" raise wildfire alarm in ForestGuard detection system appeared first on Dezeen.

Designer Emy Bensdorp has found a way to clean PFAS "forever chemicals" from contaminated clay soil by firing it into bricks as part of a project showcased at Dutch Design Week.

The acronym PFAS refers to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances – a large group of chemicals that have been widely used to make items such as non-stick pans, umbrellas and waterproof mascara but are now known to be toxic.

These "forever chemicals" do not break down in the environment when they leak into our soils and waterways. But with her start-up Claybens, Bensdorp has proved she can eliminate PFAS chemicals from contaminated clay soil by firing it into bricks.

She utilises a standard brick manufacturing process, where the ceramics are heated to between 900 and 1,200 degrees Celsius in a kiln, destroying the PFAS chemicals to the point where no trace amounts are detectable in the final product.

The Dutch designer does not believe the process emits any toxic fumes or particles, but the testing for that is still to go ahead.

"The most interesting thing about these chemicals is that they're actually great because they are water resistant, they're fireproof and they last for a long time," Bensdorp told Dezeen. "But now we know that they last forever, which is less great. And they bioaccumulate as well."

"This is actually one of the first ways to break them down, using heat," she added.

The designer first embarked on the work in 2020, a year after a Dutch Council of State ruling on preserving natural environments brought the country's building industry to a halt and led to the discovery that PFAS could be traced in up to 90 per cent of Dutch soils.

The problem is particularly bad in certain hotspots, where industrial activity, incorrect waste management or heavy use of firefighting foam have resulted in soils with extremely high levels of PFAS.

Developers and landowners are now required to take responsibility for contaminated soil so it won't leach into groundwater but according to Bensdorp, this has so far largely meant storing it in a depot, with little prospect for the chemicals' removal.

"It's a big problem, not only in the Netherlands but in all of Europe," said Bensdorp. "Legislation is coming in more and more because we're learning how toxic these chemicals are. But until now, there was no solution for the clay soil."

Bensdorp's process makes use of the extreme heat of kilns to activate a chemical reaction called defluorination, which breaks down the chains of fluorine atoms that make up PFAS.

She could theoretically make tableware, roof tiles or other ceramics using the contaminated soil but believes bricks offer the most promising solution due to the scale of production and the fact that no changes would be required to existing infrastructure or processes.

"The heat breaks the carbon-fluorine bond that's one of the hardest to break," Bensdorp said.

"The project is based on academic research. But there, they heat it for usually a very short amount of time at 1,000 or 1,400 degrees. In the brick manufacturing process, you heat it at a similar temperature for a long time."

"That's why it's so great," she added. "We can actually fit it into the existing process and use its existing infrastructure to get rid of this harmful chemical."

Bensdorp, a 2020 graduate from the Design Academy Eindhoven, has so far transformed three heavily polluted clay soils into her "clean bricks".

This includes one from the land around Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, where an accident involving firefighting foam resulted in very high PFAS concentrations in the soil. Another, within the city of Doetinchem in the province of Gelderland, had 1300 barrels of PFAS firefighting foam leaking into it over many years.

Bensdorp makes the clay soils into bricks of various colours and stamps them with a mark indicating the location of origin and amount of PFAS removed.

The designer, whose work is on show at the Secrid Talent Podium at Dutch Design Week, will next be attempting to show her idea can work on an industrial scale.

For this, she will be making 50,000 bricks from one site. Here, the fumes will also be tested to validate that the production process is fully clean.

Bricks have become a focus of innovation in recent years, with several designers proposing ways to make them in a more environmentally conscious fashion. This includes a brick made with human urine, which avoids having to fire them altogether.

The photography is by Anouk Moerman unless otherwise stated.

Claybens is on display as part of Dutch Design Week 2023 from 21 to 29 October. See Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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A group of design graduates from London's Royal College of Art have come up with a way to make RFID tags entirely from paper, with no metal or silicon components in a bid to cut down on waste from single-use electronics.

Under their start-up PulpaTronics, the team has devised a chipless, paper-only version of a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag – a type of electronic tracker that is attached to products and is most commonly found in clothing stores.

These types of tags have succeeded barcodes in many big retailers, where they allow self-checkout machines to "magically" identify items without scanning anything, while also facilitating inventory management and theft prevention.

However, these types of tags – 18 billion of which are produced every year – are "overengineered", according to PulpaTronics.

The devices rely on a circuit with a microchip and antenna, usually embedded into a sticker adhered to the paper swing tag. Due to the mix of paper, metal and silicon, they are unrecyclable and tend to end up in landfills.

By contrast, PulpaTronics' alternative RFID design requires no other material than paper. The company simply uses a laser to mark a circuit onto its surface, with the laser settings tuned so as not to cut or burn the paper but to change its chemical composition to make it conductive.

This circuit is carbon-based and the tag can be recycled with household waste as easily as a piece of paper marked with a pencil scrawl.

"This approach streamlines the manufacturing process, eliminates the need for metal and silicon components and significantly reduces the environmental footprint of RFID tag production as a result," PulpaTronics said.

PulpaTronics estimates its tags will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 70 per cent compared to standard RFID tags while halving the associated price for businesses.

The company's three co-founders came up with the idea for the RFID tags while working on a group project along with a fourth student, Jingyan Chen, as part of their Innovation Design Engineering masters course, jointly run by Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art.

Chloe So, Barna Soma Biro and Rui Ma have different backgrounds, ranging from engineering to biological sciences to fashion design, and wanted to consolidate their skills to come up with a design that would have a positive impact on the environment.

"Our approach was slightly different to the rest of the teams in our course," said Biro, who is PulpaTronics' tech lead. "We never really started with a problem and then tried to identify a solution to it as you would normally do in a conventional design process."

"Rather, we investigated various types of interesting technologies that we thought were cutting-edge from a scientific perspective and then brainstormed around what we could create out of them by trying to stay aligned to our values of reducing waste and making technology more accessible," he continued.

In addition to the paper circuitry, PulpaTronics also applied another of these experimental technologies to dispose of the RFID's microchip, which is responsible for storing data about the item that is then communicated to the reader via an antenna.

Instead, the "chipless" PulpaTronics tag uses the geometric pattern of the circuit itself to convey the information. In the company's concept designs, for instance, it's a labyrinthine pattern of concentric circles.

"This mechanism is similar to barcodes and QR codes in the sense that the information is encoded geometrically, but it doesn't need to be scanned visually," said Biro. "It's basically storing the information in the antenna."

So far, PulpaTronics paper RFID tag has passed its first round of testing, where the technology was found to match the performance of a copper-based control RFID tag.

The company – which is shortlisted for this year's Dezeen Award in the sustainable design category – will now stress test the product, looking at its shelf life, durability and whether it is affected by environmental factors.

PulpaTronics is targeting the retail industry first, particularly smaller companies that have not yet made the switch to RFID due to cost. And a preliminary trial with a retail partner in the redeveloped Battersea Power Station is already on the horizon.

PulpaTronics is also pushing for the introduction of a new symbol to designate recyclable RFID tags and raise awareness about the environmental issue of e-waste generated from hidden electronics.

Other single-use electronics in circulation today include disposable vapes and digital pregnancy tests, which show the results of a paper strip test on a tiny screen.

Last year, Australian company Hoopsy launched a paper-based pregnancy test to tackle both the electronic and plastic waste created by these devices.

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Aiming to bridge the worlds of human and robotic construction, product design engineer Jasper Mallinson has created a wearable CNC machine that he believes could one day be used on worksites to help realise parametric designs.

The Mecha-morphis device was Mallinson's final project from the Innovation Design Engineering masters course, run by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.

It serves as a type of computer numerical control (CNC) machine – manoeuvring different tools based on a path set by a computer – but one that is relatively lightweight, portable and able to combine with human control.

Mallinson describes the device as "a one-handed exoskeleton for superhuman precision". The design came out of his exploration into how digital fabrication technologies could be used to augment rather than replace human making abilities.

"Instead of thinking about digital fabrication as something separate to human makers, I wanted this combination of the two to become the core of my project," he told Dezeen.

"I wanted to lean into the idea of a universal making machine, something ultimately flexible that could be used with almost any tool and augment almost any making process."

"The project did not follow a problem-solution type design process at all," he added. "Instead, I wanted to play within this relatively unexplored design space that seemed like it would let me build something a bit insane."

The design of Mecha-morphis incorporates eight motors that are worn on one arm to control the movement of a cube-shaped frame with a tool attached to its front face.

Theoretically, these tools could include routers, drills or plasma cutters, although so far Mallinson has tested the prototype with just a relatively safe pencil and welding torch.

The frame can move on six axes, giving it six degrees of freedom while moving relatively freely and smoothly around the user's hand.

Mallinson aims for the device to offer a full spectrum of control ranging from a completely manual mode to an entirely autonomous mode, with stops in between offering stabilisation or limited human override.

The apparatus is attached by cables to a "backpack" housing the computer and circuitry that drives and monitors the motors.

While Mallinson may have started the project driven by conceptual preoccupations, he began to see real practical benefits to his invention following conversations with computational architects and construction workers.

On the ground, these practitioners had observed that, while algorithmically designed structures were becoming more common, digital fabrication methods had not caught up.

This could result in "potentially dangerous" changes to the design during construction, Mallinson explained.

"Complex parametric architecture is often particularly challenging to construct," said the engineer. "There is still a reliance on manual construction methods, which from conversations with site welders I found subject to more human judgement than expected, leading to deviations from the original model."

"These parametric designs emerge from many functional requirements being fed through unintuitive algorithms and so deviations in final outcome can be higher risk than with traditional buildings."

Mallinson points to the use of augmented reality for parametric bricklaying and the position-correcting handheld Shaper Origin router as two advancements in this area that have inspired his work.

He also sees an opportunity in the fact that Mecha-morphis liberates digital fabrication from the workshop and enables it to go wherever a human can go, with the spectrum of control options opening up new possibilities as well.

"By preserving as much human control and flexibility where possible, the device can hopefully become useful in more ambiguous tasks where digital fabrication struggles today, such as in repair, modification or remanufacture," said Mallinson.

Mallinson is still developing his Mecha-morphis prototype and is currently focused on adding position-tracking functionality using technology from the virtual reality industry.

This is a critical step that will allow the device to achieve Mallinson's desired "superhuman precision" and complete tasks such as drilling circuit boards and welding superstructures, the engineer said.

An example of digital and manual methods being combined to realise complex architecture is in SOM and Princeton University's Angelus Novus Vault, built earlier this year in Venice by a bricklayer using augmented reality goggles.

Photography by Sandy Steele-Perkins.

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Air raids, electricity outages and zero commercial flights have been some of the obstacles facing the organisers of Dysarium, which will be the largest design event to be held in Ukraine since the Russian invasion when it takes place next week.

The Dysarium conference, subtitled "Design in Difficult Times", will be held on Monday 22 October in Lviv. The city is located in the country's west and described by programme coordinator Olya Marchak as "one of the safest places in Ukraine".

There, daily life goes on almost as usual, except that the residents have learnt to retreat to shelters during air raids and designers have taken to using generators and Starlink satellite internet to keep working when the electricity goes out.

Marchak says that the conditions are safe for a conference to go ahead but that war has thrown up many challenges for the organisers, who are mainly from the youth-focused design and media space Pixlab.

"Our president is preparing us that the winter will not be so easy, because once more Russia may hit the electricity stations, turning off the electricity," Marchak told Dezeen. "We understood that in such a situation, the conference could not happen, so we were very limited in time to make it happen in autumn."

Organisers keen to shine light in dark times

With the autumn deadline in mind, the organisers have had just two months to prepare everything for Dysarium, which will be held both online and offline. Participants are coming from across Ukraine, with one speaker coming from abroad and other international guests appearing via video link.

While putting on an event during a war is challenging, the organisers don't want to wait, believing that designers need to be energised by new ideas and given a chance to connect to each other now more than ever.

"Our goal is to gather people, inspire them and also find the ways that we can be helpful for our country," said Marchak. "It's hard for us to be inspired when we see bad news all day, and we're checking the TV always."

"Our design community needs to be filled with ideas and motivation, because we are responsible for restoring our country and rebuilding it after we win," she added.

Their thinking has resonated with designers across Ukraine, with over 2000 of them registering for the conference. Marchak described a sense of duty and patriotism that had kept the design industry going during the war.

"We've really tried to keep producing work because we perceive this as an opportunity to help our country," she said. "The money we gain can help our economy and so help our armed forces."

Varied programme to "inspire and unite"

Although the war is at the front of everyone's minds, Dysarium's coordinators have aimed for a wide-ranging programme to stimulate discussion on many topics, with free attendance for all participants.

Marchak says that there will be talks focusing on accessibility and urban interaction design, and panel discussions on design education and how to help the war effort.

Base Design creative director Thierry Brunfaut, the only international guest to be coming in from overseas, will speak on "How to design a design studio", while other speakers include graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, Smashing Magazine co-founder Vitaly Friedman and designer Ross Satana, whose inclusive clothing brand Pohuy has been making items for wounded soldiers.

Brunfaut will fly into Poland and then be driven into Ukraine, as there are no commercial flights into the country.

"With this conference, we want to inspire, unite and share our knowledge," said Pixlab CEO and Dysarium main coordinator Yuriy Bakay. "We want to show how design can improve the lives of many people, making it more functional, comfortable and simply easier and more beautiful."

The organisers see Dysarium as the first large design event to take place in Ukraine since Russia's invasion in February last year. Small events have been held, including some during Kiev Design Week in September, supplemented by events in Zurich.

Designers show support for armed forces

In perhaps the biggest departure from a peacetime design event, Dysarium will also raise money for the country's armed forces, via a charity auction.

"We want to thank our armed forces that we are able to conduct this kind of event," said Marchak. "If they weren't saving us, we would not be able to be an independent country and express ourselves as Ukrainian."

Bakay and Marchak describe the Ukrainian design industry as a young one, with lots of self-taught practitioners from different backgrounds bringing a unique energy to the landscape.

At the same time, wartime nationalism has been galvanising, with more people interested in buying Ukrainian-made products or creating with Ukrainian heritage as a reference point. There has been an explosion of Ukrainian-designed fonts, for instance, replacing previously commonly used Russian ones.

Dysarium hopes to be part of this resurgent design landscape and to grow the first-time event into a regular annual conference.

"Our vision is for Dysarium to be the largest design conference in Eastern Europe," said Bakay. "It runs for a few days, not only one, and people from the whole world can travel to Lviv."

Dysarium takes place at !FEST Republic in Lviv on Monday 22 October 2023, and can also be streamed online. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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More than 142 different handle designs feature in this range of adaptive toothbrush add-ons, created by brand consultancy Landor & Fitch for people with dexterity challenges.

Chunky grips, grips that bulge outwards as if wrapped around a tennis ball and grips textured with grids, ridges or spines are at the centre of the Accessories handles, which are created and 3D-printed bespoke for each customer based on an online questionnaire.

The add-ons attach to the handle of regular or electric toothbrushes to create a larger grip, designed to be not just accessible but desirable.

The combination of form, texture and colour gives the objects a decorative or sculptural appearance, similar to a piece of homeware.

It's a big improvement on how people with limited dexterity have previously had to tackle the task of toothbrushing, according to Landor & Fitch.

The consultancy estimates there are 360 million people living with dexterity challenges worldwide. And those, whose ability to hold and manoeuvre a toothbrush has been impacted, are often having to resort to household hacks.

"Whilst researching accessible design, we came across users hacking toothbrushes in functional but extremely uncomfortable ways," Landor & Fitch's industrial design lead Jack Holloway told Dezeen.

"This was by attaching toothbrushes to hands via elastic bands, using dog toys, lollipop sticks and wet cloths. After seeing this, we realised there was a real problem that we as a creative team thought we could solve."

To develop the product, Landor & Fitch brought together a collective of people with dexterity challenges resulting from conditions such as arthritis, carpal tunnel and essential tremors.

They invited them to participate in co-designing the product in a series of "makers labs" – hands-on workshops where the participants could mould shapes, test prototypes and share their experiences.

The participants were involved in the full process, coming back to test final prototypes and give feedback. They also tested the user experience design of the digital platform, which is an essential part of how Accessories works.

On the website, prospective customers are led step-by-step through a survey that guides them to the best Accessories handle design for them.

The quiz begins with questions about the user's condition and the type of toothbrush they use before asking them what shapes are most comfortable to grip, using household objects as a reference.

"Straight like a can", "semispheric like a bar of soap" or "rounded like a tennis ball" are some of the options in this section of the survey, which Landor & Fitch's brand action and innovation director Emily Price said came directly out of the makers labs.

"We always knew we would need to develop a digital platform to help with both the discovery of shape and grip and the purchase," said Price. "However, what the makers labs unlocked was the insight into how users could best discover their perfect shape."

"On the platform we use everyday objects as part of the diagnosis for users to find their grip. This feature was the answer to one of our biggest challenges: guiding users to the correct shape when they themselves were unsure on what shape would fit them best."

The survey then drills down into what texture helps the customer to grab things better and allows them to pick a colour for their add-on: white, beige, grey or rust orange.

The finalised design – one of 142 possible permutations – is then manufactured through 3D printing, which allows the production to be low-cost and hyper-personalised.

Accessories is now in its beta phase and has been shortlisted for a 2023 Dezeen Award in the health and wellbeing product design category.

Landor & Fitch's global chief innovation officer Luc Speisser recently wrote an opinion piece for Dezeen on simple changes that can make design more accessible, arguing that it was time for designers to include people with disabilities in their thinking as a matter of course.

"We cannot continue to unintentionally exclude the one-billion people living on this planet who are experiencing some form of disability," he wrote.

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Singapore brand Will & Well has designed a clothing collection to enable people with disabilities to dress more easily, while also appealing to anyone who ever struggled with a clasp.

Will & Well's work was among 12 design projects displayed at Singapore Design Week's Playground of Possibilities, an exhibition showcasing local design innovations tackling pressing contemporary challenges, curated by Jackson Tan.

On show was Will & Well's new collection, titled Adaptable, which features clothing with easy-to-use alternatives to elements such as back zips, hook-and-eye closures, armholes and buttons – elements that everyone has struggled with at some point, even without the disadvantage of restricted mobility.

At the same time, the collection explores adaptability as a desirable quality in fashion, with two items that can be converted and worn in different ways.

The Two-Way blouse has Velcro closures on the shoulders so that a wearer with limited mobility in their arms – or their carer – can put it on without having to struggle with neck or armholes.

At the same time, it has a design that can optionally be worn back-to-front, creating extra mileage from one item of clothing.

The Convertible Cargo Pants are similar, in that the lower legs can be unzipped to turn the item into shorts.

They also feature an elastic waistband and a Will & Well innovation called HangLoops, a pair of long loops on either side of the trousers allowing them to hang off the wearer's arms so they can lower or raise the garment without stooping down or having to grip.

The HangLoops allow some people who would previously have needed assistance with their clothing to use the bathroom on their own, which can help impart a feeling of independence and dignity.

To suit the regional context, the clothing is made with light fabrics from Japan, in summery cuts and with Asian sizing.

Will & Well uses photography of both disabled and able-bodied models on its website and promotes itself as an "inclusive" brand rather than one strictly for people with disabilities.

"We primarily design our products and services with the forethought of marginalised groups, including persons with disabilities, the elderly and caregivers," Will & Well head of communications Cheryl Tan told Dezeen.

"But the kind of inclusivity that we believe in is also one where everybody else in society, whether or not they have a disability, can benefit from ease in dressing."

Tan added that almost everyone will struggle with mobility at some point in their lives, and that innovations that make things accessible for people with disabilities are often easier for everyone to use.

"At the end of the day, nobody can escape age," she said. "And you're not going to be as flexible as you were when you were younger. A lot of us won't realise how difficult it is to do something as basic as putting on your clothes until it happens to you or your loved ones."

"Sometimes it's just rude, not seeing these people or not considering them in your design process," she added.

Will & Well was started by then fashion student Elisa Lim in 2017. She had been running the business for a year making bespoke garments for people with disabilities when she decided that some of the solutions she had come up could have a broader market in ready-to-wear collections.

Now, in addition to bespoke and ready-to-wear, the social enterprise has branched out to jewellery, runs workshops, and has made a card game that aims to stimulate conversation.

They're all elements that developed organically as Lim and Tan tried to answer the question of how to make fashion more inclusive of people with disabilities.

According to Tan, the game came about while they explored the idea of a clothing collection that would make the dressing process easier for caregivers.

"As we spoke to them and as we worked with them over the years, we realised that even if we make the clothes easier to wear, that might not solve the problem," said Tan.

"In Singapore, your caregivers might be your loved ones or your family or your partner, or they might be hired caregivers, but if there are tensions or if the relationship between the two parties is not the most comfortable or the most open, then being vulnerable and being dressed by that person is not going to be as pleasant as it can be, even if you make the clothing easy to put on."

Their solution was Give Me a Hand, a series of conversation cards with a gamified aspect, where players build a path of cards between each other as they also open up and share personal thoughts and feelings.

"It's been so well received, especially in our local Asian context, because in typical Asian families, you don't really have very close or vulnerable conversations with one another," said Tan.

Other adaptive clothing designs have come from Kim Kardashian's brand SKIMS, which released an underwear line with easy-access closures last year.

In an opinion piece written for Dezeen, Luc Speisser argued that designers and brands must start thinking about changes that can make their products more accessible for people living with disabilities.

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Australian design student Alexander Burton has developed a prototype kit for cheaply converting petrol or diesel cars to hybrid electric, winning the country's national James Dyson Award in the process.

Titled REVR (Rapid Electric Vehicle Retrofits), the kit is meant to provide a cheaper, easier alternative to current electric car conversion services, which Burton estimates cost AU$50,000 (£26,400) on average and so are often reserved for valuable, classic vehicles.

Usually, the process would involve removing the internal combustion engine and all its associated hardware, like the gearbox and hydraulic brakes, to replace them with batteries and electric motors.

With REVR, those components are left untouched. Instead, a flat, compact, power-dense axial flux motor would be mounted between the car's rear wheels and disc brakes, and a battery and controller system placed in the spare wheel well or boot.

Some additional off-the-shelf systems – brake and steering boosters, as well as e-heating and air conditioning – would also be added under the hood.

By taking this approach, Burton believes he'll be able to offer the product for around AU$5,000 (£2,640) and make it compatible with virtually any car.

Burton is a bachelor's student in industrial design and sustainable systems engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne but has worked on REVR largely outside of his course.

The spark for the project came a few years ago when he and his dad started thinking about converting the family car, a 2001 Toyota that Burton describes as well-built and reliable.

"But it's just not really something you can do get done," he told Dezeen. "It's super expensive and it's not really accessible."

Burton wanted to find an affordable solution for others in his position while helping to reduce the emissions associated with burning petrol as well as manufacturing new electric vehicles, which are estimated to be even higher than for traditional cars.

With REVR, people should be able to get several more years of life out of their existing cars.

The kit would transform the vehicle into a hybrid rather than a fully electric vehicle, with a small battery giving the car 100 kilometres of electric range before the driver has to switch to the internal combustion engine.

However, in Burton's view, this is where people can get "the most bang for their buck" with few changes to the car but major emissions reductions.

"You can't fit a huge battery in a wheel well but we wager you won't need one," said Burton. "While people drive a lot, especially here in Australia, on average they drive 35 kilometres a day and it's mostly commuting."

"This distance would require only a five-kilowatt-hour battery, and we can put three times that in the wheel well."

Burton used the motor modelling packages FEMM and MOTORXP to develop the design of his motor, which sees the spinning part, called the rotor, placed between a vehicle's disc brakes.

The stationary part, or stator, is fixed to existing mounting points on the brake hub.

Borrowing a trick from existing hybrid vehicles, the kit uses a sensor to detect the position of the accelerator pedal to control both acceleration and braking.

That means no changes have to be made to the car's hydraulic braking system, which Burton says "you don't want to have to interrupt".

While the design is in its early stages, the concept was advanced enough for the jury of the James Dyson Award for exceptional student design to pick the project as the national winner in Australia.

The international prize winner from the 30 included countries will be announced on October 18.

Burton plans to use the AU$8,800 winnings from the national award to buy a small CNC machine and the specialist materials that are required to build a working prototype, building on a previous non-working prototype made in RMIT's workshop.

He says he has "a stretch goal" of converting a million cars with REVR and is interested in working with partners in the automotive industry. But he is also critical of its lack of investment in retrofitting to date.

"It's like with repairability, industry is so against that," Burton told Dezeen. "They love the whole planned obsolescence thing."

"Ultimately, to retrofit goes against their profit margin because it extends the usefulness and the lifetime of their products. I think that's why there's retrofitting companies out there but they're still largely reserved to classic cars. It's just so expensive to do."

Previous winners of the James Dyson Award include an infection-sensing wound dressing created by students from the Warsaw University of Technology and a fish-waste bioplastic by British designer Lucy Hughes.

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British startup The Tyre Collective has begun to make products from the microplastic particles that come off car tyres as they drive on roads, producing results including jewellery, a lamp and a battery.

The group – which was awarded the UK national James Dyson Award in 2020 for its car-mounted tyre-wear capturing device – worked with a range of collaborators to create the objects, which were displayed at the Material Matters fair at this year's London Design Festival.

According to The Tyre Collective, over a million tonnes of synthetic rubber particulate is produced annually by tyres on Europe's roads, and this tyre wear is a major source of microplastic pollution on both land and sea.

"The air we breathe in London contains more tyre wear than exhaust pollution," said the Tyre Collective. "This problem is worsened with electric vehicles from the added battery weight and torque."

The group worked with designers Rafael El Baz and Qiang Li, studio Lowpoly and scientists from the Queen Mary University of London Materials for Sustainability Group to experiment with potential uses for the material.

Lowpoly, a Madrid-based company specialising in sustainable 3D-printing, created a series of objects by mixing the rubber with recycled PLA (polylactic acid), a type of plastic often used for filament in 3D printers.

Their pellet mix contained 20 per cent tyre particles to 80 per cent recycled PLA. From it, they fabricated objects including a vase, speaker, lamp and acoustic panel, all with a lustruous, faintly translucent dark grey finish. The material can be further recycled.

Li, who operates the jewellery brand MuseLi-Q, mixed the tyre-wear rubber with resin and recycled sterling silver to make a series of rings, with the particles suspended in the clear resin in a manner that the designer said reminds her of inclusions within gemstones.

She also made a sculptural brooch that is meant to represent a single tyre particle, with a vial of the material surrounded by stones that reflect the elements within it.

With London-based El Baz, who works primarily with waste, The Tyre Collective explored many different material compositions that could be made by mixing the rubber with materials such as resin and jesmonite.

El Baz used one of his favourite variations – a semi-translucent, rubber-flecked resin – to make the base for a mushroom table lamp.

Neither the rings nor the lamp are recyclable due to the mixing of rubber with resin.

Wanting to go beyond decorative design and look at functional applications, The Tyre Collective's final collaborator was the Queen Mary research group, led by green-energy lecturer Maria Crespo.

The researchers made a coin battery – a small, single-cell battery of the kind that might be used in a wristwatch – using the rubber. The rubber was carbonised and made into a slurry that was coated on a copper foil to make the battery, in combination with other components.

The collaborations were funded by the Terra Carta Design Lab, a competition launched last year by King Charles III and former Apple designer Jony Ive to support solutions for the climate crisis.

The Tyre Collective is concurrently still developing its tyre-wear capture device, which is designed to be mounted near the wheels of vehicles and uses static electricity to suck in the rubber particles emitted during driving.

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British designer Gareth Neal and Dutch studio The New Raw have used thrice-recycled plastic and a new 3D-printing method to create the objects in the Digitally Woven series, which are printed in loops rather than layers.

The designer and the studio displayed several of their creations — a pink chair called Loopy and three vessels with a look reminiscent of woven baskets — at the Material Matters fair during the London Design Festival.

Neal is known for making furniture that references or incorporates heritage crafts and usually works in wood, while The New Raw specialises in robotic manufacturing with plastic waste.

The collaborators paired up with the goal of exploring how traditional craft techniques such as willow work, knitting, crocheting and paper-cord weaving could inform a new style of 3D printing.

They hoped to develop a method that would allow for imperfections in the final product and therefore reduce the amount of waste due to misprints.

For Digitally Woven, Neal and The New Raw created objects using various patterns of interlocking loops, which gave the structures strength and enabled the makers to use three-times recycled plastic, a rarely used material.

Currently, when working with recycled polypropylene plastic filament in 3D printing, the mix of source materials in the waste stream and the number of times it has been recycled are factors that can make it more unstable.

However, Neal and The New Raw's technique is visibly different from typical 3D printing, where the filament is added in layers to build an object.

Here, the printing robot has extruded thicker cords of material, almost like icing from a piping bag, laying it down in a looped pattern in 3D space.

According to Neal, the print lines for the machine are based on ones drawn by hand, creating a nuanced look informed by natural movement and crafting tools.

"At the time of starting the project, The New Raw was printing in a very traditional style with layered prints that had come from putting 3D models through slicer tools," Neal told Dezeen.

"They asked me to look into how we could consider using their technology to capture craft techniques that they had started to explore to disguise the misprints," he added.

Their experimentation yielded a "massive amount" of samples and textures, said Neal.

"The open weave structures were a totally new breakthrough and are really quite special in that they create structurally strong, lightweight objects using half the normal material use," he continued.

The designer said the project, which had been funded by a European Union grant, had involved a steep learning curve for him, as he had rarely used additive manufacturing and never worked with plastic.

"I learned so much," said Neal. "It has also reinforced how important the close relationship is between artists and manufacturers. If a manufacturer is open to experimentation, a designer or a maker really can introduce new approaches to traditional methods."

Neal is now working to expand and refine the range of Digitally Woven products. He says the Loopy chair can be made to order in any colour, using plastic from any waste stream.

Neal's previous work has included picnic furniture made with marquetry and a CNC-machined but 1780s-inspired chest of drawers that is in the collection of the V&A.

The New Raw's projects include the Ermis chair, a monobloc seat made from its own 3D-printing waste.

The photography is by James Champion.

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L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude's last work, is being recycled by Parley for the Oceans, which will turn it into tents and sun shades for use during the 2024 Olympics and other events in Paris.

In 2021, L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped saw the monument on Paris's Champs-Élysées shrouded in 25,000 square metres of silvery fabric tied in place with 7,000 metres of red rope.

Both fabric and rope were made of woven polypropylene, a type of thermoplastic, and intended to be recycled — a vision that is now being realised by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation in collaboration with environmental organisation Parley for the Oceans.

The organisation has already processed the materials and is now in the design and production phase.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has confirmed the tents and shade structures created will be used in major events including the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which the city is hosting next year.

"A constant commitment of Christo and Jeanne-Claude was to reuse, upcycle and recycle all materials used in their projects," said L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped project director Vladimir Yavachev.

"I can think of nothing more fitting than recycling this artwork for future use in Paris, a city so influential on the lives and work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude," he added.

Parley for the Oceans founder and CEO Cyrill Gutsch said it was meaningful to be giving a second life to an installation that he had seen as "a flag of rebellion" and "an encouragement that seemingly impossible ideas can become a reality".

"The ropes, the fabric of the artwork are testament of the true superpower we humans possess: imagination," said Gutsch.

"We will create tent structures that are designed to protect human life against dangerous heat waves," he added. "And to supercharge our hearts and our minds for the epic challenge ahead of us."

"I know it for sure, together we can create a new economy where harmful, toxic and exploitative business practices are a relic of the past."

The wood and steel from the substructure of L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped have already been reused by the organisation Les Charpentiers de Paris and the companies ArcelorMittal and Derichebourg Environnement.

It is two years since the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation unveiled L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped, a posthumous work for both artists.

Christo passed away in 2020 and Jeanne-Claude in 2009, but the pair had conceptualised the project together in 1961. The artists and their foundation consider all of their public projects and indoor installations as collaborative works by both Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped had been scheduled to go ahead in 2020, but was postponed to 2021 after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

After Christo's death, the project was finalised by his team along with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, Centre Pompidou and the City of Paris.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are most well-known for "wrapping" famous buildings and landscapes in their massive-scale artworks.

While some critics have attacked the waste or environmental interference of their projects, the artists' foundation maintains that they recycled most materials and left sites in the state they found them in, or better.

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Mobility design studio Springtime Design aimed to avoid some of the pitfalls of e-bikes when developing this two-in-one bicycle for German manufacturer Lemmo.

Lemmo One is both an electric bike and a conventional mechanical bike, with the conversion achieved via a removable battery pack that attaches to the frame and a hub motor on the back wheel that can be disengaged so as not to block normal pedalling.

Users only need to slide the battery pack into its slot under the top bar of the frame to activate e-bike mode.

Lemmo One gives users two different cycling options – depending on whether ease or exercise is the priority – as well as addressing a common problem with e-bikes: their more frequent need for repair.

While the lifespan of a pedal bike is typically 15 years, according to Springtime Design, it is currently much shorter for e-bikes. Estimates in online e-bike publications tend to put the figure between three to ten years.

With the Lemmo One, nearly all of the electronic components are housed in the detachable battery pack, which Lemmo calls the Smartpac. This way, the pack can be easily sent away for repairs and even be upgraded every few years, extending the vehicle's lifespan.

The innovations were developed by German start-up Lemmo, which brought Springtime Design on board to develop the overall design concept and detailing of the bike. The studio also had to define the location of the Smartpac in the frame and develop its industrial design, UX and UI.

"The main challenge really was to make the Smartpac have a logical role in the bike, and to ensure the bike makes sense with and without it," Springtime managing partner John Kock told Dezeen. "And I think we succeeded in that."

"The bike looks and rides great both as a commuter e-bike and as a sporty pedal bike."

The only electric component that cannot be removed from the bike is the 250-watt hub motor, which Lemmo calls the Dual Mode Hub because it can switch between two modes.

When the mechanical clutch is applied, the motor disconnects from the drivetrain so as not to cause resistance as the rider pedals.

"If you want to be able to ride the bike as a regular pedal bike, you don't want any friction caused by the hub motor," explained Kock.

"A hub motor that is not powered always gives more resistance than a pedal bike hub," he added. "By physically decoupling the motor from the axis, this resistance is taken away."

Without the three-kilogram Smartpac, the Lemmo One weighs 15 kilograms, making it much lighter than the average e-bike and similar to a conventional road bike.

The bike has a powder-coated aluminium frame with a carbon fork. It is made using a no-welding technique, creating an overall smooth look.

Kock considers Lemmo One "a very serious step in the right direction" after the bankruptcy of leading e-bike manufacturer VanMoof put the vehicles under the spotlight in recent months.

He says that while "VanMoof did a great thing for the bike industry, becoming the new benchmark", the company was hampered by developing most of its components in-house to achieve a "unique" integrated design.

"The disadvantage of this is that every single component had to be developed from scratch and some came with some initial flaws," said Kock.

"Multiply that with fantastic sales numbers and a service organisation that can't keep up, and then there is a problem. Because of their high level of integration and customisation, only VanMoof can fix a VanMoof."

He said Lemmo had decided to take a different route, using more trusted third-party components and making the Smartpac detachable for easy repair and replacement.

"But obviously also Lemmo has the obligation to carefully build up a proper service organisation to support their growing customer base," he added.

Lemmo launched the Lemmo One in its native Germany earlier this year and has since expanded to France and the Netherlands.

The design has been longlisted in the product design category of the 2023 Dezeen Awards, alongside Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip smartphone and an upright piano designed by Lorenzo Palmeri Studio.

Images courtesy of Lemmo.

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