Liquid Wood Chairs: Classic Material Flows in New Furniture

For all its flawed variability, wood has long remained a leading go-to choice for creating furniture. Still, competitors like plastic (and issues of scarcity and sustainability) make its old uses less appealing with time. Thus, a new form of industrial production:liquid wood built from organic materials like bamboo, flex, hemp, jute and rattan, featured in chair form this year in Milan.

Like some sort of postmodern alchemy, a type of resin is created from discarded wood-pulp of the aforementioned plants, natural fibers and fish oils; the murky mixture is compressed, heated and ultimately fused together in a durable, strong and toxin-free alternative to petroleum-generated products.

Under heat and pressure, the resulting viscous substance can be used for injection-molding furniture pieces with all the flexibility-but-rigidity of traditional plastics. Best of all, the products are recyclable – no cancer-causing or otherwise toxic agents are fed into the mix. Like conventional wooden furniture pieces, the materiality is still present in the finished chairs (or tables or whatever you wish).

Translucent…Wood?! New Sibling to See-Through Concrete

If you thought that see-through concrete was a cool material innovation, this even more refined-looking wooden counterpart may dazzle you even more. And with the core technology now fully developed, the sky is the limit – virtually any material can be made to let light pass through it.

Sandwiched between wooden slats, the vertical strips that help light move from one face to the other are visible as tall thin bars – but like vertical pixels, the effect of the composite image is readily apparent as our minds stitch the image back together. The resulting high-tech hybrid material can be deployed in everything from structural walls to horizontal surfaces or room dividers.

Similar cutting-edge, light-transmitting fiber-optics as those that allow lights and shadows to penetrate concrete (pre-cast or poured on site) are used by Luminoso to carry light from one side to the other – making considerations of density and thickness obsolete. Just imagine: a warm and dark wooden wall providing physical and psychological solidity and security – but that also lets light shine through it.

DIY Plant Furniture: Green-Growing Organic Home Objects

Bamboo has been known to grow at rates up to 24 inches in a single day – just imagine if we could harness that growth to build cheap, easy and durable objects for our own without the material, transportation and design costs of a normal furniture piece. Like a plant-world version of Frankstein’s monster experiments, this is experimental science on a fantastic fringe.

Kai Linke has taken grasses, bulbs, bamboo and other quick-growing plants, fashioned molds for their branches and root systems to populate and pushed their limits through a series of deformations. This may seem far fetched to those with a more ordinary green thumb, but consider how artificial the environments are in which most plants grow – it is not really such a stretch from genetic engineering, farm plotting and other common agricultural practices of both large and small scales.

The results vary, but the overall effect is impressive: most of these forced-growth situations result in densely-packed plant systems that bend, wrap and twist into every nook and cranny of the desired table, stool or chair shape desired. The objects are fluid, messy and unpredictable, yet their uniqueness speaks volumes about the intersection of human influence and natural processes.

Whether these will hold their form once the mold is removed or revert to their natural form, this concept is well worth exploring. With the focus on self-replicating machines and nanotechnology advancements one has to wonder if we are missing an obvious source of inspiration: Mother Nature herself and the incredible speed, strength and flexibility with which much of the world’s plant life can grow.

Waterproof Paper!? Artisan Pottery of Waste, Wood & Sand

It might be a bit pretentiously presented (complete with cute little rusticated tags), but would you be less than boastful if you brought together so many elements in one design? These clever works are a combination of local, free-trade, artisan-made pottery pieces plus a biodegradable set of recycled materials.

Without using synthetic chemicals or eco-harmful varnishes, Ceylon Paper Pottery has developed a 100% waterproof hybrid material made of waste wood, reused paper and simple sand. The result looks and feels like rough homemade papers, but has the strength and durability of typical pot-throwing materials.

It sounds simple, but there is a careful selection process – blends of differently dyed papers produce a variety of organic brown tones as well as blacks, whites and everything in between.

Their collections vary over time, but are all based on an underlying “light, strong, unbreakable and eco-friendly” construction system that can be used to replace ceramics or porcelain. Once could imagine a number of uses for this method and material set beyond these more arts-and-crafts-type applications.

Added accents make use of local scrap woods including mahogany, teak, mango, kumbuk and other exotic and colorful hardwoods that would otherwise be expensive to use in home products.

Newspaper Wood: Turn Pages into Recycled Home Products

Mieke Meijer has already shown that logs are not necessarily cut-and-dried wood, literally or otherwise, but in this next chapter his new material idea takes shape in the form of actual furniture, lamps, jewelry and other physical (and useful) objects.

It began as a student design project – stacks of newspapers meticulously and individually glued together, rolled into a tight ‘log’ and left to dry, deform and harden just like living trees would do. After they ‘cure’ these building blocks can be cut, carved, routed, mortised and so forth as one would with normal wood.

Years later, in collaboration with the Dutch design ground Vij5, Mieke began to roll out real products based on these reconstituted pieces of ‘timber’ … the result: a series of practical and experimental items that make structural and/or aesthetic use of recycled newspapers in new ways.

NewspaperWood has grains and rings much like a tree, as well as a unique and variegated texture akin to that of wooden-surfaced craft objects.

Each slice or spin reveals different cross-sections of print with its own visual (as well as structural) properties.

With missing production, assembly, marketing and sales components met by his partners, one wonders if a truly different mass-market material may have just been born.

Hyper-Flexible Wood Notepads Bend the Rules of Materials

Technology should be used to make our lives easier and better – there’s no doubt about it. The creative types at Snijlab agree: the Rotterdam-based service uses their computer-controlled laser cutter to make products on demand. Some products they invent and develop themselves, like these impressive wooden booklets.

The booklets use a revolutionary laser cutting technique developed by Snijlab for making wood flexible. The technique allows the single piece of wood to be bent nearly in half (without hinges and with no cracking or breaking) to form a front and back cover. Between the two covers is a small pad of paper held in place with a tiny clip.

Each booklet is made from a single piece of birch plywood and finished with a clear varnish. According to the manufacturers, booklets like these could easily and inexpensively be made on-site by anyone with a laser cutter. But in case you don’t happen to have one, Snijlab offers them for €25 (around $33).

Nanotechnology Makes Paper Into Waterproof Super-Paper

Despite moving toward a paper-free society, we still use paper fairly often in our daily lives. And to be honest, paper isn’t that great. It’s easily ruined by something as simple as a coffee spill and can spread disease by virtue of its tendency to transmit bacteria and other nasty things. But if we could apply new technology to the very old material, perhaps it could be revitalized. The Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, Italy has created a nanoparticle coating that could be applied to individual paper molecules to make paper antibacterial, waterproof, magnetic and even fluorescent.

The process works by creating an itty-bitty “shell” around each fiber of the paper. The new properties of the paper depend on which nanoparticles are used: silver for antibacterial and iron oxide for magnetic, for example. After the polymer is applied to the paper fibers, the paper continues to act like normal paper. You can write and print on it, fold it up, even recycle it just like always. The antibacterial paper could be an incredible advancement for food packaging, and other enhancements could help create more secure currency or protect important documents.

Better Fuel Cells Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that promises to generate electricity as cheaply as the most efficient gas turbine. Their innovation, which paves the way for pollution-free power generators that serve neighborhoods and industrial sites, lies in replacing ceramic electrodes with stainless-steel-supported electrodes that are stronger, easier to manufacture, and, most importantly, cheaper. This latter advantage marks a turning point in the push to develop commercially viable fuel cells.

New Solar Cells Researchers in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division (MSD), working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan's Ritsumeikan University, have learned that the band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (eV) as previously thought, but instead is a much lower 0.7 eV. The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight-from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet-to electrical current. If solar cells can be made with this alloy, they promise to be rugged, relatively inexpensive-and the most efficient ever created.

Aerogels Aerogel is a lightweight, advanced material that consists of more than 96 percent air. The remaining four percent is a matrix of silica (silicon dioxide), a principal raw material for glass. This material is one of the lightest weight solids ever developed. Possible uses include: Environmentally friendly, energy-efficient, recyclable alternatives for polyurethane foam in freezers, refrigerators, refrigerated vehicles and freezer display cases. Alternative insulators in appliances such as water heaters and ovens. Aircraft and aerospace industry applications. Luminescent composites with potential opto-electronic applications. Magnetic composites that may be useful for paramagnetic cooling at ambient temperatures. High surface area carbon monoliths for electrochemical applications.

Gas-Filled Panels Gas-Filled Panels, or GFPs, use thin polymer films and low-conductivity gas to create a device with extraordinary thermal insulation properties. GFPs are essentially hermetic plastic bags that can take on a variety of shapes and sizes. Inside the outer barrier is a cellular structure called a baffle. Argon gas filling provides an effective thermal resistance level of R-7 per inch, krypton gas provides R-12.5 per inch, and xenon gas provides R-20 per inch. Energy use of domestic refrigerator/freezers is directly influenced by the overall thermal performance of the cabinet and doors. An advanced thermal insulation technology can improve the efficiency of appliances such as refrigerators. Insulation materials are critical in buildings designed for low energy use and good thermal comfort. Increasing the thermal resistance, or R-value, of the insulation is an effective strategy to lower heating costs when thermal loads are dominated by the building envelope. Thermal insulation will be increasingly important in the future development of cars because significant improvements in gas mileage can be achieved by downsizing the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment. Waste reduction and higher thermal performance compared to close-cell foam is possible using Gas-Filled Panels. The panels feature low mass and low volume.

Milestone reached for hard drive storage

Seagate Technology, involved in the EU projects ULTRAMAGNETRON and FEMTOSPIN, has doubled the storage capacity of today’s hard drives with the Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology supported in these projects.

Seagate achieved the one terabit per square inch demonstration with breakthroughs in materials science, in particular ferrimagnetic rare earth-transition metal alloys, and near-field optics.

The EU project ULTRAMAGNETRON contributed considerably to the scientific understanding and Seagate will continue to work on the subject in the project FEMTOSPIN which is aimed at developments even beyond HAMR.

Envelop van Afrikaanse boombast

Deze enveloppen zijn gemaakt van Afrikaanse boombast, een eerlijk en duurzaam materiaal. Deze dienen om een duurzame boodschap te verspreiden en campagne te voeren.
De enveloppen dragen bij aan armoedebestrijding, behoud van het oerwoud en CO2 reductie.
De enveloppen kunnen hergebruikt worden, er horen daarom ook meerdere adreswikkels bij.