ORIGINAL: Smart Planet
Designers at Philips are taking the idea of the natural ecosystem indoors and applying it to everyday appliances. This past week, Philips unveiled “the Microbial Home,” a set of domestic machines that re-use household waste for power or offer natural alternatives to electronic or chemical processes typically used in a contemporary home.
These range from the Bio-digester kitchen island, which houses a device that converts solid waste from the bathroom and vegetable trimmings into methane gas for fuel, to the Bio-light, which is designed to use luminescent bacteria that feed on methane and composted materials.
“Designers have an obligation to understand the urgency of the situation, and translate humanity’s needs into solutions. Energy-saving light bulbs will only take us so far,” said Clive van Heerden, Senior Director of Design-led Innovation at Philips Design, in a statement. “We need to push ourselves to rethink domestic appliances entirely.”
Other elements of this system include
- the Larder, a table made from reclaimed wood that includes a terra-cotta food-storage system and a table-top garden
- a sleek indoor beehive for harvesting honey
- a scultpural “up-cycling” machine made from plywood and copper that breaks down plastic waste using enzymes found in mycelium (mushroom fibers)
- the Filtering Squatting Toilet, which sorts for solid waste to feed to the Bio-digester island
Although these appliances won’t be manufactured any time soon, lifelike models of the concepts are currently on view at the Piet Hein Eek gallery during Dutch Design Week (which opened on October 22 and runs through October 30) in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. While the thought of cooking dinner with gas harvested from bathroom waste might not seem appetizing, the elegant concepts of Philips’ Microbial Home appliance system may seduce some skeptics via the power of their eye-catching design.
Images: Philips
About Reena Jana
Reena Jana is a contributing editor for SmartPlanet.
Philips Design Probes
The ‘Microbial Home’ project is part of the Philips Design Probes program, which was established to explore far future lifestyle scenarios based on rigorous research in a wide range of areas. Probes projects are intended to understand future socio-cultural and technological shifts with a view to developing nearer-term scenarios. These scenario explorations are often carried out in collaboration with experts and thought leaders in different fields, culminating in a ‘provocation ‘designed to spark discussion and debate around new ideas and lifestyle concepts. Previous Probe projects include
- 'Electronic Tattoo',
- 'Emotional sensing dresses',
- 'Sustainable Habitat', and the
- ‘Food Probe’.
The Design Probe projects carried out by Philips Design are part of a wider Philips strategy aimed at improving the innovation hit rate. While it is not intended that design concepts coming out of the Probes program are translated to marketable solutions, insights gained from debate around the concepts feed into future innovation for the company.
Philips Design’s creative force of some 400 professionals, representing more than 35 different nationalities, embraces disciplines as diverse as psychology, cultural sociology, anthropology and trend research in addition to the more 'conventional' design-related skills. The mission of these professionals is to create solutions that satisfy people's needs, empower them and make them happier, all of this without destroying the world in which we live. For more information, please visit: www.design.philips.com.
Comments
Post a Comment