Interior Design Sense

Opening Monday, March 15th in Long Beach, CA, EcoTopia is a competition and exhibition highlighting new concepts in green product design. The show will feature a variety of eco-products from designers that are all focused on fostering a healthy ecosystem and more sustainable society. The 20 products included in the juried exhibition will be available for viewing in Nectar Design’s Studios from March 15, 2010 to April 15, 2010.

Read the rest of EcoTopia: New Concepts in Green Product Design

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We are so thrilled to announce that Rebecca Soskin of Rebecca Soskin Interior Design has joined the Material Girls family as our new New York blogger!

Rebecca is an interior designer in NYC who has so much great design experience and is as sweet as can be.  She previously worked for decorator Markham Roberts and Laura Ashley, Inc. before opening up her own interior design business.  In more recent  news, she was named as one of House Beautiful’s “Designers to Watch in 2010″.

Welcome Rebecca!

Be sure to checkout her recent post, Get the Look for Less!

If any of the furniture in the Vitra Haus looks familiar it should, these are some of the most iconic designs of the current and past generation. The entire collection of Vitra classics are now housed in the new addition to the Vitra campus which was commissioned by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and recently finalized. The construction situated in Weil am Rhein on the border of Switzerland and Germany is a series of twelve houses positioned to make the best of the landscape attributes and features special areas for specific designers and room settings. Visit Vitra for a look at their entire collection of modern furniture here. Via designboom

Post from Vitra Haus : The Ultimate Modern Furniture Showroom Weil am Rhein, Germany

Flowers die, but the Dandelion portable windmill will keep on brightening your day without the wilting. A new wearable tech accessory from designers Mary Huang and Jennifer Kay, this beauty uses tiny windmills and turns the energy generated from the moving blades into LED light or plugable power for a small electronic device. The quirky design is also made from 99 percent reclaimed materials!

READ MORE AT ECOUTERRE >

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How much wine do you drink a year? How about a month? A day? Wow you drink a lot. And how do you display that wine out in the open? You don’t just stand it there next to your toaster do you? For shame! You’ve got fabulous taste in wine, you aught to be twisting it up nice in a knot, a “Wine Knot.” Everyone will ohh and ahh! at you when they stick their eyes upon this beautiful wood and metal masterpiece. This piece of wildness is made of two intersecting bent pieces of plywood held up by a simple metal rack. Rack em up!

You can stick 6 of your regular wines in there, and a big one in the center. Not for those who have a ton of kiddies around, unless of course you keep your wine out of their reach anyway? I bet you do. Kiddies can’t be drinking wine. You drink wine!

Designers: Scott Henderson, Tony Baxter, and Alberto Mantilla [Buy It Here, Wine Knot Wine Rack is available for $128 @ YD Store]

Wine Knot Wine Rack is available for $128 @ YD Store

Attention all you design-obsessed Houstonians!   Three of the city’s top Designers are competing for your vote in the, “Redesigning Downtown,” Style Competition at One Park Place, Downtown’s newest luxury apartments.

Renea Abbott, Michael Stribling, and Chandos Dodson have each designed an apartment, and YOU get to decide which one you like the best!  Tickets are $10 and benefit Discovery Green.  I, for one, can’t wait to check it out! 

Core77’s latest 1 Hour Design Challenge asked designers to create solutions for pop up emergency shelters to aid those afflicted by a natural disaster such as the Haiti earthquake. Winners were just announced, and Dan Ostrowski took home the honor with his Lifetent, a portable shelter packed into a backpack that also can carry a water supply. Dan’s Lifetent is inflatable, lightweight, easy to transport, and packs away when not in use. If such shelters were to be manufactured, natural disaster refugees would be able to move about in order to find fresh water and food.

Read the rest of Lifetent: A Portable Emergency Shelter That Folds Into a Backpack

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Not too long ago, we had a post here on Freshome about the earthquake in Chile with a few tips on how to design safe homes, that would resist minor seismic activities. In this post we would like emphasize some efforts that are being made in order to help the people of this community. Architecture for Humanity is a non-profit organization which plans on helping Chile reconstructing its buildings, after the devastating earthquake The organization was founded in 1999 and is currently collaborating with more than 40000 designers and architects who are “willing to lend time and expertise to help those who would not otherwise be able to afford their services”.

This is the call for action message we found on their site:. “By making a donation today you are supporting a grassroots network of architects, designers and building professionals to lend their talents and expertise in communities where there services are most needed and can least be afforded. You know design matters. Help us use the power of design to build a more sustainable future in communities around the world.“

We salute the initiative of Architecture for Humanity and we are giving you a chance to help out as well, by donating in order to help rebuild the constructions in Chile.

We’ve heard people say how hard it is to move from one place to another because of all the things they have to carry around. And it’s a universal fact: we have too much stuff! For today we’ve gathered up a collection of 17 cool and unconventional shelving ideas that we hope will solve some of your storing problems. We tried to select the items that are not only practical, but that would improve how a place looks and feels. Most of them are unusual, for example take a look at the vertical wooden panels, which are particularly interesting. Vertical or horizontal, it is truly impressive how the designers managed to make these furniture items so functional. We also like the fact that they are built from classic materials, which makes them fit well in a variety of interior designs. -via HomeTopHit.com

There’s a paradigm shift in the science of food. Fifteen ago proper nutrition meant augmenting the kind of foods you ate. Buzz words like low-carb, low-cal, non-fat, low-glycemic, organic, and natural made their way into our vocabulary and yet we’re becoming fatter and unhealthier. Philips Design envisions a range of products that not only identify the true contents of food, but also how it affects your individual body.

The Diagnostic Kitchen enables people to take a much more accurate and personally relevant look at what they eat. The system is comprised of a tabletop, scanning wand, and swallowable sensor. The wand is an interactive device that gives you real time data about what’s going on inside your body, everything from salt to water ratio, hydration, fats, proteins, etc… By docking the wand and placing a food item you might eat on the tabletop, the wand updates to show how this item will affect your body.

The end goal is finding equilibrium. As you continue to use the system, you’ll gain an understanding of how food really affects you. As you find balance, the wand keeps a visual record of your progress and displays it across the surface. This is a provocative and unconventional look at food but one that can have a profound effect on how we eat. Imagine what that wand would look like if you placed a Big Mac with fries and a coke on the tabletop. The damn thing would probably explode.

Designers: Philips Design