vizualz

It’s no secret that we’re fans of London’s Black+Blum: year in, year out, the design duo always seems to have something new up their collective sleeve. The recent NYIGF was no exception, as it was occasion for the official unveiling of three new designs.

First up, the “Eau Good” water bottle is a clever take on a water bottle with a natural filter.

The bottle uses a filter system with binchotan active charcoal, which has been used in Japan as a water purifier since the 17th century. It reduces chlorine, balances the pH and adds minerals to the water. Most importantly, it makes tap water taste clean and delicious.

The design of the eau good combines the vintage feel of the cork stopper with the unique clear, blow-molded bottle and the utilitarian aspect of the centuries-old filtering system.

The filter takes roughly 6–8 hours to work its magic and after its six-month lifetime, the charcoal can be used as an odor absorber for refrigerators.

The “Lunch Pot” (center) is a new offering in their line of tupperware containers: a pair of pots that neatly snap together, a handy solution for those of us who often bring multi-part meals for lunch. The watertight, BPA-free, microwave- and dishwasher-safe pots also feature an unique threadless enclosure for added convenience. Meanwhile, the strap remains secure even when the “Lunch Pot” is inverted or otherwise subject to the abuse of transit.

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[photos via wood and metal]

That there is the perfect object. It’s completely functional, it’s the latest evolution from a history of progressively better objects that have been around since man’s earliest days, and it’s freaking beautiful. It’s the two-pound Velvicut Premium Hudson Bay Axe, and it’s made using that perfect blend of high-tech machines and an experienced craftsman’s handwork.

While I’m suspicious of outdoor tools that are pretty–when you’re working outdoors, hardcore functionality is everything and aesthetics don’t mean a damn thing–this one is made by Council Tool, lending it some instant cred. The North-Carolina-based manufacturer has been producing quality tools since 1886, and I dig that the company president who narrates the making-of video has the same name as the company.

In the vid you see a 90-year-old eye-punching machine, the brutal, no-margin-for-error drop forging process in action, and you learn something cool about Council’s ideology: They retain and retrain. Even as they upgraded their tooling, they kept the guys who used to do the rough grinding by hand and trained them to program the machine that took the task over, rather than letting the machine replace them altogether. “There’s no substitute for experience here,” says Council.

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Like Carousel USA, Turntable Works is another California-based manufacturer of large-scale turntables. But the latter firm has got a product I could not have envisioned: A portable, folding motorized turntable called the Pack-Man, which comes in diameters ranging from eight to fourteen feet.

Here’s a sign you’ve seen too many building projects go wrong: At the six-second mark of the demo video, when the whole mechanism starts to tilt, I instinctively jerked my hands out towards the screen as if I could help the guy by grabbing it. But apparently it’s designed or allowed, however inelegantly, to do that.

Didn’t think it would fit a full-size car, did you? I like how they jump-cut the footage during loading, as I’m sure there was some finagling required to avoid driving off of the platform. But in any case the Pack-Man is an impressive feat of design and engineering, allowing one person to set the thing up in just five minutes.

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Turning this:

Into this:

Cleveland suffers from what I’m calling Detroit Syndrome. The population of the onetime million-resident city has shrunk to just 396,000 as manufacturing jobs have disappeared, meaning it’s filled with dilapidated and abandoned buildings.

Those buildings—whether houses, churches, or retail spaces—are constructed out of wood, which means tearing them down can provide a veritable forest’s worth of raw material. That’s where an organization called Reclaimed Cleveland comes in. As they explain,

Most of the homes slated for demolition in Cleveland are nearly 100 years old (some even older) and were built with old growth lumber that is dense and beautiful. Reclaimed Cleveland is leading an effort to salvage lumber from local structures and give it a new life as well designed home furnishings and accessories. We are also working with a local non-profit, Towards Employment, to train ex-offenders in home salvage and give them skills and a new start in the construction trades.

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It’s so cheating!

The idea behind a Zen garden is that combing all of that sand into intricate patterns improves the practitioner’s concentration. It’s not easy to do—and that’s the point. So Simon Hallam’s Zen Table contraptions on Kickstarter, which automatically draw pre-programmed patterns via what appears to be a magnetic ball and some type of CNC mechanism, would probably be considered an abomination in the Zen Buddhism world.

Yet I have to concede that the machines, which come in both small and large sizes, are cool as heck:

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Lisbon-based studio Cabracega recently collaborated with designer André Gonçalves on USMA, “a clock without a visual interface,” which is intended to “bring the countryside into the city.”

In Portugal, the urban population keeps growing year after year, in accordance to the world tendency for desertification of the rural space. In the urban space, the pace is increasingly fast because time is money and every second counts.

USMA is a clock without a visual interface, resorting only to sound to mark the passage of time. The sound of the church bell is the clock hand, which intends to bring home the rural experience with the definite goal of giving a new rhythm to city life.

That’s right, the clock has no display: instead, it simply indicates the time by chiming the number on the hour—as well as a single chime every half hour—in the manner of a traditional clocktower.

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Lest it seem unambitious to “creative unconventional and timeless objects” these days, Shiny Hammer actually delivers with a series of distinctive articles of furniture. In keeping with designer Samuel Aguiar’s interest in balancing “use and art,” he approaches design “as a couturier or an architect would do, [such that] each creation becomes a representation of a lifestyle, an environment or a culture.” The projects date back to 2010 in terms of original ideation, but they’ve been realized over the past year and a half and have only recently come to fruition.

The Plee chair features a single bent aluminum form atop vaguely Eiffel chair-like legs.

This chair is the result of a manufacturing process developed by Shiny Hammer called C.I.M. which is aimed at using a bending process which is rough yet sophisticated. The end result is unpredictable, although controlled. As a result, each chair is unique.

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Dur-O-Tone Newsprint White.

via fsr

Mapping Your Manor.

via Richard Hogg

Awesomeness perfectly animated.

via Thrill Seekers