"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."
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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.
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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