"Abod is a sustainable home built from lightweight materials that can easily be delivered by truck, plane or ship. It’s made mostly of non-combustible materials so it carries a low risk of fire (a real concern in communities where kerosene lighting is common). And if the family ever needs to move, the home can be very easily relocated."
When design is used not just to sell more widgets but to solve problems of the world, I am filled with a great deal of optimism. Here for example is the Gravity Light, meant to cleanly, safely and sustainably replace kerosene lamps.
"GravityLight is a revolutionary new approach to storing energy and creating illumination. It takes only 3 seconds to lift the weight which powers GravityLight, creating 30 minutes of light on its descent. For free."
GravityLight is a revolutionary new approach to storing energy and creating illumination. It takes only 3 seconds to lift the weight which powers GravityLight, creating 30 minutes of light on its descent. For free. Following the initial inspiration of using gravity, and years of perspiration, we have refined the design and it is now ready for production. We need your help to fund the tooling, manufacture and distribution of at least 1000 gravity powered lights. We will gift them to villagers in both Africa and India to use regularly. The follow-up research will tell us how well the lights met their needs, and enable us to refine the design for a more efficient MK2 version. To achieve this we launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo and we have been thrilled by the support shown during the first 24 hours of the campaign start. But it's not yet over we still need your support by contributing to the project and spreading the word. Contribute to this effort here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/282006/x/1848870
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Three architecture students from Spain have developed the Stone Spray Project: a robot that uses CAD drawings to program a robot to 'print' buildings out of sand using a special binding agent. I would imagine that bonded sand would have remarkable compressive strength. Not so sure about tensile, shear and torsional strength. I am really interested to see if/when this moves past the proof of concept phase.
A research project Stone Spray done by Anna Kulik, Inder Shergill and Petr Novikov under the supervision of Marta Male-Alemany, Jordi Portell and Miquel Lloveras in the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in the year 2012. The goal of the project was to research the field of additive manufacturing in architecture and to propose a new eco-friendly, efficient and interesting system to print architecture in 3d. As a result a robot and series of samples were created. Also a book describing the project was published. The group would like to additionally thank Santiago Martin, Guillem Comprodon and Luis Fraguada for their help in this project. Music: Nicolas Jaar - Wouh More information can be found on the website of the project: stonespray.com
It becomes enormously clear that good design is about problem solving when an innovatively simple and flexible product comes on to the scene.
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