SPACE10 ECO FRIENDLY DESIGN.
IKEA’s research lab Space10 focuses its work on eco-friendly design. From open-source bee hotels and algae-producing domes, to cookbooks featuring future-proof food and miniature villages that demonstrate how communities could create clean, circular energy – the research lab is working hard to create a healthier and more eco-friendly world.
Space10 | Photo Credit Hampus Berndtson
Founded in 2015, the research lab and its exhibition space in Copenhagen are on a mission to produce prototypes, conceptual products and design solutions that boost wellbeing for individual customers and for the world as a whole.
Over the years, Space10 has collaborated with artists, designers, technologists and innovative thinkers to create a range of radical projects that push sustainability as a priority for design.
The cookbook ‘Future Food Today’, which was produced in 2018, includes recipes for a mealworm burger and algae hotdogs – offering ideas for dinners that are both healthy and more environmentally minded. The book avoids using unsustainable sources of protein, suggesting replacements like insects and algae, or unpopular fish like perch. All of the recipes were developed in the test kitchen of Space10’s Copenhagen home.
Image Via Gestalten
SPACE10 Lab | Image Via Dezeen
In a recent exploration into how technology is being used at home, Space10’s Everyday Experiments is a series of digital experiments which challenge the idea that technology at home is intrusive or confusing. Instead, the experimental collaborations look at how technologies can bring joy, calm and a feeling of safety into the domestic space. Perhaps an exploration that is especially important in a year when everyone has spent a disproportionate amount of time at home.
One experiment, for example, looks at home the home space could be turned into a musical instrument. Another looks at whether furniture could be reimagined as a friendly, responsive creature. In order to achieve this, Space10 worked with Random Studio to create an app called Hidden Characters, which attributes faces and personalities to your furniture.
Space10’s success is, in part, due to the thoughtful and elegant products that incapsulate these forward-thinking designs. Almost inconspicuously high-tech, there is never any compromise on the aesthetics of the pieces that the lab creates. Making things beautiful is, perhaps, part of the process of making a user accept and then consider these products part of a new way of living.
Cluster also sets out to include designers in its curated community that push the sustainable agenda. There are several makers amongst the talented section of craftsman in this year’s edition of Cluster Crafts that look at how technology and craft can come together to make objects that are exquisite and ingenious.
SPACE10 Grow Room | Image Via Design Boom
Charcoal | Image Via Austeja Platukyte
Austeja Platukyte
is another designer included in the Cluster 2020 edition with a strong sustainable philosophy. Platukyte focuses on material research and introduces social, cultural psychological and economic context into her process.
As a designer Platukyte is as fascinated with the afterlife of her products as she is with their forms and function. She explores new substances for design, including algae and calcium carbonate, and how they can both be durable and biodegradable. Her research work hopes to take the pressure off the natural resources that conventional design has depleted by suggesting new possibilities.
Lighting Object in Turmeric | Image Via Austeja Platukyte
Spirulina Powder | Image Via Austeja Platukyte
Senilia Coffee Silverskin | Image Via High Society Studio
High Society
a practice based in South-Tyrol, Italy, creates plant-based lighting and furniture by upcylcing post-industrial waste from organic resources.
The studio sits at the intersection of technology and craftsmanship, highlighting that waste can be reimagined as a valuable resource. The designers place wellbeing at the heart of their work, for both humans and the environment.
High Society’s tubular light collection Senilia is part of Cluster’s 2020 exhibition. Made from the by-products of beer brewing and coffee production processes, the irregular family of lights are each handcrafted and given unique forms and character. The material takes on its own particular natural pigmentation from the different waste materials, ensuring the final work doesn’t shy away from its origins.
Folding and bending, the lights have a certain softness and tactility to them, even though they are fully solid and unchanging.
Emre Can uses a 3D printer to create his ceramic work. With his pieces he hopes to capture the emotional impact that the natural world can make on its observers. The intricate shapes Can creates aim to in some way mimic the organic and spontaneous shapes found in nature.
The combination of artificial machines used in creation and the natural forms taken for inspiration capture the tension between the natural and the human world.
P.O.N.3 | Image Via Emre Can
P.O.N.1 | Image Via Emre Can
Ivy Chair| Enrico Gondim | Image Via Design Boom
Brazilian designer Enrico Gondim focuses on social design and works to develop and promote sustainable products in his home country. He aims to acknowledge and celebrate the handcraft communities in Brazil by showcasing the beautiful shapes that these methods can create. His Ivy Chair, for example, takes its cues from the microstructures of palm leaf folding.