Hammer 1.0 was a rock. Hammer 2.0 was a rock attached to a piece of wood, and the caveman that came up with that one must have been pretty pleased; he was the first ergonomicist. Today we have tons of tools featuring a handle of one material and a head made of another, but there’s [...]

With help from The Walkabout Foundation , Whirlwind Wheelchair International , who have been designing tough, durable wheelchairs built and used in developing countries since 1979, have delivered 350 Rough Rider chairs to Haiti with another 600 on the way. Easily repaired and built at low cost, the chairs help those injured in the quake live full lives in their communities [...]

As a designer and writer, I amass and burn through an absurd amount of pens, and it pains me to think that each and every one is bad for the environment. That’s right, those little plastic cylinders are like bullets being shot into the planet: DBA 98 Biodegradable Pen from DBA on Vimeo. The DBA 98 Pen , in contrast, [...]

Manhattan is only a few miles wide and roughly 10 miles in length, and just about every square inch has been developed. So it blows me away that cities like L.A. still have miles of property, in the city proper, that they still have the leeway to remake. One such area is L.A.’s Cleantech Corridor, a gargantuan chunk [...]

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to interview Younghee Jung , the globetrotting Nokia ethnographer whose job is to research how people use their mobile phones all over the world. While doing preparatory research, I came across footage of Jung doing a presentation where she explained how an Indian girl from an impoverished rural region [...]

Newsworthy is the name Weitzner Limited’s rather amazing wallcovering made from, you guessed it, recycled newspapers. Using an age-old technology of upcycling old newspapers, 100% real newsprint strips are handwoven on a loom and then paperbacked to make Newsworthy suitable for the wall. Maintenance-wise it can be vacuumed off for cleaning, but like real newspapers, [...]

Today furniture company West Elm announces their  Pratt Home Office Collection , a line of eco-friendly furniture done in collaboration with the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation, which helps students bridge the gap between design school and the real world. “The students had literally just taken off their caps and gowns,” said Debera Johnson, director of The Pratt [...]

Neil Conley , a Coroflot member and a 3-D design graduate of Northumbria University, has developed a sustainable carbon fiber composite, entitled “X Endless .” The project relies on a recent development in composite recycling: a specific pyrolysis method that unwinds the carbon fibers from the composites that bind them, allowing them to be re-used. This method has allowed [...]

Unveiled July 13th, the GE WattStation is fuseproject’s new electric vehicle charging station for GE’s Ecomagination Initiative . The charger is meant to lower the adoption barrier for electric cars, reducing the required charge time and, with the use of smart-grid technology, it allows utility companies to manage the impact of these plug-in vehicles on local and regional grids. The docks [...]

The armadillo-like SunRed solar moped concept features a cool way to cover the bike up when it’s parked: a retractable shell covered in solar panels. When you’re ready to go, just roll the cover back and fire the moped up, as it’s now been juiced up by the sun. Designed by Barcelona-based Guimeraicinca, a partnership between [...]

Now, this is some truly brilliant package design: Mycologist Paul Stamets’s Life Box , a simple cardboard box impregnated with a mixture of Department-of-Agriculture-approved seeds.

The Life Box suite of products builds upon the synergy of fungi and plants by infusing spores and seeds together inside of packaging materials that can be planted. The Tree Life Box is made [...]

BY TAD TOULIS The other day as I sat in a hotel room in Milwaukee watching Anderson Cooper grow more and more telegenically indignant about the BP oil spill, I found my thoughts returning once again to a growing list of recent governmental and institutional failings. The entries on the list are familiar to us all: the housing [...]

We’ve just announced the winner of the $10,000 Betacup jury prize, but an additional $10,000 has been set aside to be split among the top 5 community favorites. These are The Betacup and Betacup Campaign (one of the jury’s honorable mentions), the Cuptokeep, the NextCup, the Neutral Resource Coffee Cup, and Networked Loyalty. Community Prize #1: The [...]

Six months ago, Toby Daniels and the product development firm Mutopo set their minds to eliminating the wastage of paper coffee cups—North Americans consume 58 billion year, most of which end up in landfills. To solve this problem, the team turned to design and set up Betacup, an open innovation challenge with a $20,000 incentive. With the backing [...]