New Yorkers take their sidewalks seriously: With over 12,000 miles of sidewalk in the city, there is a lot to care about. So who wouldn’t like the idea of making one of the most used urban features just a bit nicer? The recently funded Kickstarter project  Softwalks makes small design tweaks to drab New York sidewalks, [...]

If the raw materials used to create these chairs appear ugly at first blush, well, they’ve earned the right; for all of their useful lives they’ve served as broom, rake or spade handles, helping people keep their floors and yards tidy. Core77 fave  Reinier de Jong has turned these cast-off items to the more aesthetically pleasing, [...]

This is the first article in a series examining the potential of resilient design to improve the way the world works. Join designers, brand strategists, architects, futurists, experts and entrepreneurs at  Compostmodern13 to delve more deeply into strategies of sustainablity and design. When I began my journey to understand global overfishing, I knew that it was a [...]

For his Masters Thesis in Packaging Design at Pratt Institute,  Aaron Mickelson created a series of eco-friendly packages that are designed to be consumed with the products they hold such that no waste remains. Per his description of  the Disappearing Package :

Every year, we throw away a ton of packaging waste (actually, over 70 million tons). It makes [...]

Speaking of  reuse, I’ve mentioned how I do what I’m guessing many of you do, and reuse all of my incoming cardboard boxes by turning them inside-out for re-shipping. Well, the sticky people over at 3M and Scotch apparently want in on this box-reusing action. In the bottom of my last Staples package I found this [...]

Garth Johnson runs the irreverent  ExtremeCraft website, “A compendium of Art masquerading as Craft, Craft masquerading as Art & Craft extending its middle finger.” He’s also the author of  1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse: Remake, Restyle, Recycle, Renew . And in his TED Talk entitled “Recycling Sucks! The History of Creative Reuse” Garth points out that recycling is [...]

The furniture pieces you see here all look quite old, but in fact, they’re brand new. They’re all made by  Furniture from the Barn , a Pennsylvania-based outfit that gets their raw material, as their name implies, from no-longer-used barns. The family-run business works with a local Amish concern that takes down dilapidated 18th-Century barns in the [...]

Now and then something appears in the local pages of Italian newspaper that deserves English translation. This is from the  Turin section of La Stampa :

A new eco mall will double the size of Turin’s Eataly From green cars to sustainable food to bio-clothes By Emanuela Minucci Oscar Farinetti doesn’t stop. And stays true to his ideas. Notwithstanding the [...]

Of the five Hong Kong design outfits  Thomas Lee shot for his  CoSPACE CoCREATE video series, at least three are relevant for Core77 readers. The first is his look at  KaCaMa Design Lab —that’s ID’ers  Kay Chan, Catherine Suen and  Match Chen—on their mission to re-use post-consumer waste. To that end, they’re upcycling ad banners (the real kind, not the kind you [...]

I’m sure I’m not the only person who hides the Brita when company comes over and feels terribly guilty tossing those carbon-filled plastic filters every couple of months. In fact, it’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why there wasn’t a beautiful, more sustainable and affordable alternative on the market. I clearly [...]

The motto of  LifeEdited, an experiment in compact living started by Treehugger founder Graham Hill, is an alluring one: “Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.” The design of the prototype LifeEdited apartment (actually Hill’s residence) fulfills the motto neatly, incorporating furniture you’ll recognize from our Resource [...]

I’ve read that during the Industrial Revolution, it took a special kind of mind to envision the types of actions machines could perform. For example, early attempts to create sewing machines attempted to mimic the act of two human hands passing and plucking a needle back and forth through fabric, and those attempts failed. The [...]

Designer Massoud Hassani hails from Qasaba, Kabul, amid a landscape ravaged and weaponized by landmines that still lurk in off-limits regions. Although the ” Mine Kafon ” dates back to 2011, when he presented it as his graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven , the lo-fi de-miner was recently the subject of a short film by Focus Forward Films. [...]

It’s pretty brutal for older female actors in Hollywood, who seem to have a de facto expiration date stamped on them; beyond a certain age there are simply no good roles that Meryl Streep hasn’t already scooped up. Well, it’s even worse for chickens. Stacey Kelly is a fourth-year industrial design student at New Zealand’s [...]

Tim Jahnigen is a multicreative, Dean-Kamen-like inventor who has created “systems and technologies with patents pending in a diverse range of industries, from construction and banking to science and medicine.” In recent years he turned his attention towards what initially appeared to be a smaller problem: Redesigning the soccer ball. During the last World Cup [...]

Toronto-based design group  Castor gets called a lot of names, especially sustainable—that S word whose egregious misuse irks us so. Not that Castor isn’t sustainable, there are just so many better ways to describe them. Founders Kei Ng and Brian Richer say their furniture and lighting collection has a “sense of irreverence,” a sentiment echoed by [...]

Ok, not quite—the aluminum frame for the Sky Greens innovative planting system tops out at about nine meters, or about three stories. But considering that the farm yields some five to ten times more than conventional methods, the metaphor stands at least as tall as the pulley-equipped towers:  according to their website , [...]

As of this weekend, the big story in the Tri-State Area is gas. Whether you’re in Jersey or the five boroughs, petrol is scarce, lines are long and tempers are running short. So I was extra astonished to read,  in the Telegraph, that a UK-based energy company has made a novel breakthrough: They can now create synthetic [...]

Our current linear model of ‘take-make-dispose’ is throwing up major economic and environmental challenges. Risk to our supply chain is increasing, and the cost of materials is rising sharply, putting pressure on businesses to change. We need to shift towards more circular systems and good design thinking is pivotal to this transition. In order to [...]

If this comes to fruition, this may be the sweetest, or at least largest-scale design gig we’ve ever heard of:  Dror Benshetrit designs an island for 300,000 inhabitants. Not just the structures they’ll live in, but the entire island. The Canal Istanbul project is the current Turkish Prime Minister’s plan to bisect Istanbul on the European side, [...]