 Dumper, designed by Sam Johnson “We talk about design and sustainability.” This is how ten.blog describes its intention. Ten is a group of designers who have got together for the last three years to create products based on responsible design. The designers are Tomoko Azumi, Stephen Bretland, Carl Clerkin, Gitta Gschwendtner, Chris Jackson, Sam Johnson, Michael Marriott, Hector Serrano, Onkar Singh Kular and Nina Tolstrup. Last year’s collection wood is a series of practical, affordable, and sustainable objects for the home.
One of the designers, Chris Jackson, was frustrated with the general low level of social awareness in the design industry. In 2005 he took a year off to research sustainable and ethical design. He came up with a project called ‘Ten’, where he grouped together ten London-based designers, and then asked them to source materials for new products within a 10 km radius of their homes, and within a budget of ten pounds each.
Jackson feels this was a great chance for designers to get back to their most basic skill, ingenuity. More than aesthetics, the design of an object was dictated by its function, resulting in some pretty interesting outcomes. Constraints and limited resources produce fantastic pieces of design, often created by users and non-designers.
Ethical living is one of the main issues Ten addresses. As Jackson explains, we now live in a use-and-throw society, people don’t think of repairing every day objects, but just replace them without a thought. It is this issue that these designers strive to resolve, which is apparent on each of their sites. They create, re-use products, and re-invent products. Their strong focus on functionality does not mean that aesthetic considerations suffer, in fact, far from it. Their products have instant likeability, and many have that ‘wow’ factor, besides being sustainable, affordable and usable.
Some of the products I really liked were this wedge racer, designed by Gitta Gschwendtner, which also doubles up as a door-wedge, and can be enjoyed by adults and children.
The extreme flexibility of Nina Tolstrup’s designs makes them ideal multi-purpose prodcuts. The 1 X 1 Trestles are pieces of wood that can form a range of interior objects, including lamps, a chair, a ruler, and hooks, all made in the same 1 x 1 wood sections. The 2-hanger utilizes the parts that generally go waste in manufacture, to create another unique product. The on/off alarm is the easiest thing to switch on and off, just tilt it one way or the other.
Do check out each designer’s site, as they all feature really some unique and intriguing products.
By Armeen Kapadia
While a lot of us take electricity for granted, there are an estimated two billion people living without power from the electric grid. These people rely on outdated, expensive, and unhealthy sources of illumination such as kerosene, candles, etc. SunNight Solar has developed a flashlight that uses solar energy, and can be used for various lighting conditions.
SunNight Solar was started by Marc Bent, a US diplomat and oilman who had spent years working in Africa, and wanted to give back. Lighting takes up almost 30% of a family’s disposable income. The SunLight series of flashlights will provide light for 750 to 1000 nights, 8 hours per night – which is a minimum of 6000 hours. Unlike conventional flashlights, which lose approximately 3.8% of energy monthly, this flashlight stays charged all the time. The SunLight series uses Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMh) AA batteries, which are the more expensive, but have the least environmental impact.
The SunLight solar flashlight, unlike many products, is easy to open up. With just a coin, one can open it, remove a battery, put in a new one and close it again. The torch has a solar photovoltaic panel that generates electricity. The electricity is stored in the three batteries. The user has to place the flashlight in the sun during the day. Though this looks like a flashlight, it can be used to light up a room. It has several different settings for different light conditions and needs of the consumer. The design of the flashlight ensures there is circulation of air around each of the batteries, vital for the batteries to retain and store energy. In many products one has to figure out the direction the battery goes in, but in this flashlight, all three batteries go positive side first, so there is no confusion.
Bent has designed the product himself, and there’s even a model in pink, to discourage men from seizing the products from women. Bent initially had invested heavily in the project, and later got help from Innocentive, an R&D firm. Thousands of Africans are using the solar powered light; SunNight Solar has passed one million in sales. Bent wants to expand the line and add a solar-powered UV water-filtration system.
By Armeen Kapadia
 Kyoto Box Kyoto Box solar cooker is a pin-hole camera kind of solution for food. Joe Bohmer, a Norwegian, now based in Kenya, has designed a basic solar cooker, which looks like a child's science experiment. The outcome is life-altering for thousands living in Africa. It is a cardboard box that uses the sun's rays to cook without burning firewood.
The Kyoto Box consists of two cardboard boxes, one inside the other. The outer cardboard box flaps are intact, whereas the inner box flaps are removed. The inner surface of the outer box is covered with tin foil to concentrate the sun's rays. The inner surface of the inner box is painted black to maximize absorption of solar energy. A plexiglass cover is used to trap heat inside. Temperatures inside the box can reach at least 80 degrees Celsius on a sunny day. Kyoto Box can boil 10 liters of water in two to three hours, and boiling or near-boiling water can cook beans, rice, grains and meat. The Kyoto Box, already in production, costs $6, and can be produced in any cardboard factory.
The design is smart and efficient for rural Africa. It is claimed that this product will prevent two tonnes of CO2 emissions per family per year. This sustainable innovation can make solar cooking widespread in the developing world. With Kyoto becoming popular, villagers don't have to trek miles to collect wood nor spend hours inhaling wood smoke. Reducing reliance on firewood reduces deforestation.
The best ideas aren't always the most sophisticated. In an interview with CNN, Bohmer said, "A lot of scientists are working on ways to send people to Mars. I was looking for something a little more grassroots, a little simpler. It took me about a weekend to design it and it worked on the first try." Some skeptics feel that this innovation is just a band-aid on a cancer lesion.
Listen to the BBC Interview here. The intention here seems right, and the future should reveal its true effect.
By Sanjay Basavaraju
 IdeaPaint Kit A paint that transforms surfaces into a dry-erase board: IdeaPaint. The very fact that such a product encourages instinct and decreases resistance to express openly is fascinating. It can become a brainstorming canvas in offices or expressive canvas for kids in playrooms.
Applications can be many for this patent pending product. IdeaPaint is planning to increase its presence in schools, serving as a low-cost solution. The spaces within schools can now evoke creativity. If I were to take IdeaPaint back in time when I was growing up, my mother could have written down how many clothes went for laundry on the wall, marked how many days the milkman didn't deliver the milk, reminded my father of paying electricity bills or didn't have to bother what I was scribbling on the wall.
It is perfect to jot down things. You could coat an entire room and go berserk. The possibilities are endless. It costs $4 per square foot. IdeaPaint claims that it is environmentally free too. This post on apartmentherapy.com features 8-ways to use IdeaPaint in your home.
IdeaPaint has the potential to transform traditional classroom into 360 degree dynamic learning environments. Target uses it in volunteers school libraries. The product is gaining momentum in the education sector. Many investors are funding IdeaPaint because they see tremendous market potential in the product. IdeaPaint has taken $5 million in its first venture funding from Breakaway Ventures.
IdeaPaint is certified as the most environmentally friendly dry-erase product available.
By Sanjay Basavaraju
 Q Drum in action In developing countries, women walk miles in heat to fetch water. Studies suggest that in remote villages of these countries, women spend more than half their lifetime fetching water. Q Drum is trying to change that equation. Its design is a perfect example of form aiding function.
What Q Drum achieves is staggering. It is a known fact that clean water is one of the essential resources for everyday survival in developing countries. Q Drum is popular with children because they find the very nature of its design engaging. The activity of using Q Drum allows children to be active helpers in domestic duty, which could free women from fetching water. Since children are going to use it, the ease of use was a primary concern. A child can pull 50 liters of water over flat terrain. The Q Drum is simple, cost effective and durable. The idea is to keep the weight on the ground. In achieving that, the surface of the container will be in contact with the ground so it was essential to have no moving parts or handles that could break. Considering the space these drums occupy, they are stackable.
In the early 90's Pieter Hendrikse worked in rural areas and villages around Pietersburg, South Africa, and he noticed how women and children struggled to get water from few taps to their homes, in some cases kilometers away. Usually women carried the containers on their heads like in the rest of rural Africa, which invariably caused many neck and spine injuries. In an attempt to find an easier way to transport water, a doughnut hole through a cylindrical container was prototyped.
While I am at this, I find another solution for a same problem. It is called Hippo. It is again based on the concept of rolling rather than carrying. These cans hold 90 liters of water. Although the weight of a filled can is 90 kg, it is transformed to an effective weight of 10 kg, which means that almost anyone can easily manage a full roller.
Conceiving the idea is relatively easy, but to resolve manufacturing details is key to the success of such innovations. It is a challenge to bring down manufacturing costs. At times, it can be frustrating where the manufacturing technology can't aid the design. The development of a concept and its testing, needs time, effort and money.
Collecting water reduces productivity, limits educational opportunities and traps households in poverty. The strategy of these products is to focus specifically on reducing the social, economic and health consequences of carrying heavy loads of water over long distances.
By Sanjay Basavaraju
 portablelight.org Some two billion people worldwide live without electricity. A Boston-based architect, Sheila Kennedy, wondered how LED technology could be used to help communities living without light. She led a team of designers and engineers in creating a new lighting material, Portable Light that enables people to harvest light. Portable Light is a combination of three existing technologies, namely flexible solar panels, LED lights and a lithium cell phone battery. It came from Kennedy & Violich Architecture, also known as MATx, a Cambridge, Mass., firm co-founded by Kennedy and her husband Franco Violich.
Portable Light is designed mainly for the ‘off the grid’ people in tropical zones. In 2005, Kennedy, an anthropologist, and a group of architecture students from the University of Michigan took Portable Light to the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, to introduce it to a group of Huichol Indians. After days of trekking in the mountains they came across a group of people dressed very differently and who didn’t mix much with other villagers. They were the Huichol Indians. They understand the potential of the sun, so they have some understanding of solar energy. They easily adapted to the new Portable Lights, which can light up an entire room for cooking, schoolwork, or art and craft. They wear the light in the form of bags on their back in the day; at night the bag unfolds into a large surface.
Kennedy talks of the surgeons during the 19th century, who used to operate with the light of a candle; they had just mastered how to reflect that light with mirrors for optimum use. Each Portable Light consists of a 17-by-17-inch fabric panel, it can be adapted to create different kinds of light, more focused, or spread over a large area. To know more on how it works you can read about Portable Light on Miller-Mccune.com and on Portable Light.
Portable Light has been adapted culturally as well; the Huichol Indians are weaving their own traditional patterns, bags, and mats using this amazing fabric. With new innovations several squares of Portable Light can hook together, share power and light up a larger area.
The Huichol Indians feel they don’t need electricity from the power grid, as they don’t have malls or any such development. If they get power lines, that might lead a factory to spring up, which will forever change their way of life. The Portable Light might change their way of life, but in a much more positive way.
The team at MATx have come up with many amazing products. Another project is weaving Portable Light into a solar-powered blanket. This caught the imagination of Krista Dong, a doctor working with TB patients in South Africa. A blanket that could absorb the heat of the sun all day, and use that energy to keep the patients warm at night was just the thing that was needed.
“Working in the so-called Third World, not only are we bringing people the benefits of a little power, we’re also getting great ideas about how we can translate these technologies to our own countries,” Kennedy says. “The idea that we’re going to have a top-down centralized system of lighting in our housing and architecture is a historically outdated idea.”
At first 50 Portable Lights were distributed by a raffle system among 11,000 Indians, and Kennedy and her team hope to distribute many more, not just there but across the world.
By Armeen Kapadia
 oxo.com Design that doesn’t work can be seen all around us. Its the packaging that wont let you get to the product, it’s the print that’s too small to read, it’s the peeler that won’t peel easily, the kettle that burns your hand, or the tap that won’t turn quite completely. So it is always heartening to see design that works so beautifully, that it’s as good as invisible. One such company is OXO Good Grips, and the range of household and practical products they offer.
The founder of OXO Good Grips, Sam Farber, is an entrepreneur with an economics degree from Harvard. He founded Copco, a range of kitchen products in 1960. Later, his wife Betsey, developed arthritis that made even the simple use of most kitchen and household products very painful. He looked for better tools, and finding none realized that he could develop new ones based on observing users working with the tools. Out of this OXO Good Grips was created, an entire range of exceptionally easy-to-use products, design that everyone can use.
If we think about it, tools are extensions of the human body, and almost become a part of us. The lines between tools, and the human body are always blurring. Humankind’s earliest ‘designs’ were basic tools; simple objects that helped them dig, chop, cut, or hunt better.
In an interview, Sam Farber says that the universally accessible concept is of huge importance. We should seek to create products that can be used throughout a person’s lifetime, even with the problems of aging, regardless of gender or state of health. This is transgenerational design, that takes into consideration all aspects of life, even in extreme weakness, or extreme flexibilty.
Sam Farber also stresses on the importance of the user, and the need to have a perfect harmony of form and function. For example, while studying users the team realized that the handle of the peeler was too thin to lend a proper grip, so they made a wider handle. This still did not solve the problem totally, and a further insight was to create a handle of a squishy, or soft material that would ‘invite’ a user to grip it, as well as strain the hand a lot less. They also developed a ‘swiveling’ blade that would move, instead of the user twisting their wrists in an uncomfortable action. The blade itself is ultra thin so that it does not peel of chunks of the vegetable.
It is insights such as these, and innumerable more, that have lead to a range of products from watering cans, to tissue dispensers. Each product is aesthetic, and blended perfectly with its function and the human being. As founder Sam Farber said, “Whether it is the design of a program, a product or some form of communication, we are living in a world that's totally designed. Somebody made a decision about everything. And it was a design decision.”
Lets try and make that a good decision.
By Armeen Kapadia
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