today and tomorrow

I had just a quick look at the 2009 Bachelors of the Design Academy Eindhoven. These 3 projects cought my attention:

Minimal Dress by Digna Kosse

‘May I ask how many costumes she wears out each year?’ ‘My dear sir, the clothing of a lady does not wear out through her wearing of it, but through her being seen in it.’ Richard Steele Our clothes are more quickly discarded as a result of changing fashion than because of wear and tear. The consumption of material by the clothing industry is gigantic as a result. Digna Kosse designed fifteen dresses that are far from voracious consumers of material. She demonstrates that you can minimize these pieces of clothing to a few threads at the most. Minimal Dresses are wispier than wispy, yet they remain feminine dresses with which to make a fashion statement.

photo by Lisa Klappe

Dimensions by Steie vanVugt

Steie van Vugt made a mirror installation that played with the dimensions of a space: the mirrors pull the space apart like a kaleidoscope and display conflicting images. The installation emphasizes and blurs angles and holes, creating both calmness and complexity. Dimensies gives an empty concrete space a unique finishing touch and lets people reflect on how they experience a space.

photo by Rene van der Hulst

Wastesthetics by Laura Lynn Jansen

Is it possible to elevate waste into a thing of beauty? Laura Lynn Jansen put plastic packaging items into a transparent bag, created a vacuum and discovered that it took on aesthetically attractive forms. This inspired her to make a garbage bag from a stretch material reminiscent of mother of pearl. ‘By being able to see the shapes inside, it becomes a kind of work of art that changes its form every day.’ The bag can be hung in a special frame. Jansen would like to have a weekly plastic collection day introduced on which everyone would hang the bag on their door. ‘A street with a shiny white shape on every house front. On the basis of the bag, you can say something about someone’s identity – something from the inside is shown on the outside.’ She hopes that Wastesthetics will make people aware of how much garbage they produce.

photo by Astrid Zuidema

The Muji Award is an international design competition organised by Muji, a Japanese retail company. They have just announced the result of the third edition. These 2 projects are my favorites:

‘Trash pack for outdoors’ by Ken Sugimoto and Eri Sugimoto.

A trash bag that easily stands up by itself. By taking advantage of the triangular pack that originated in Sweden and has been used for years for serving milk for school lunches in Japan, we were able to achieve a sense of stability, while the tendency to worry about the actual contents of the bag has been lessened. Can be put to good use when camping, on a picnic, or with other outdoor activities.

‘Grandpa’s nail hook’ by Masashi Watanabe.

My grandfather nonchalantly pounded nails into posts and hung various things on them. So that things didn’t fall off these nails, he unconsciously pounded them in at an angle. To me, these felt like the most rational sort of hook you could get. While a simple nail would have sufficed, I made a few alterations. It struck me that if you could secure a nail at a set angle and length every time, then you could have beautiful hooks anywhere you could pound a nail in.

Flexibin by Li Jianye, sometimes it can be that simple.

Oliver Bishop-Young is a graduate from Goldsmiths University in London. His Skip Waste project actually has 2 sides. One part is a website where people can submit the location of a skip and its contents, other people can search that website for items they could use. The second part are suggestions what you could do with an empty skip, the pool one is my favorite.

found at dezeen

So what is this?
A turntable with a garbage bag on it.
Part of the ‘Livraison’ photo series.
Another project by Maurice Scheltens.

For those of you who want to take out their garbage in style: Drawstring Garbage Bags in Black, White and Blue Damask.

If you don’t read PingMag by now, it’s your own fault! They have an interview with Heath Nash. He’s a designer and uses other peoples garbage to make products.

Business model of the day: NYC garbage.