Growroom by Ikea

Ikea has released free instructions to allow anyone to build The Glowroom, a spherical garden which allows an entire community to grow their own food and encourage socializing and community bonds to form.

SPACE10 envision a future, where we grow our own food much more locally. To spark conversations about how we can bring nature back into our cities, grow our own food and tackle the rapidly increasing demand for significantly more food in the future, we teamed up with architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum to create The Growroom. Standing tall as a spherical garden, it empowers people to grow their own food much more locally in a beautiful and sustainable way.

From Taipei to Helsinki and from Rio de Janeiro to San Francisco, the original version of The Growroom sparked interest and people requested to either buy or exhibit The Growroom. But it doesn’t make sense to promote local food production and then start shipping it across oceans and continents. That is why we now release The Growroom as open source design and encourage people to build their own locally as a way to bring new opportunities to life.

https://medium.com/space10-the-farm/space10-open-sources-the-growroom-aa7ca6621715#.d3k67ajwh

In keeping with the trend for New Porn that has been emerging almost as a counter reaction to the ubiquity of bad porn on the internet, we are seeing a rise in new magazines seeking a new perspective. The latest to emerge is from Future-Filter's very own creative partner Ed Vince in the form of TALC Magazine. TALC offers a new fresh concept and perspective on erotica shown as part of a celebration of general visual stimulation to include architecture, design and furniture, it is also key to Ed that it is an "antidote to lads’ mags".

Recently launched on Kickstarter to promote and distribute the magazine bi annually it will be a fresh and compelling addition to publishing.

Just opened in Paris is the Envie/Alive exhibition curated by Carole Collet which explores issues around synthetic biology. The exhibition begins with a statement  'A quiet revolution is happening. A new breed of designer has begun to reshape our world by re-orchestrating our relationship to nature'. Most of the work is not new, but it is for the first time that it is all under one roof.

Showing the likes of Emile de Vischer's pearling and Amy Congdon's biological atelier it also explores the work of architects and designers who are exploring the bio-engineered world.

Presenting a new design landscape with a glimpse to our synthetic future and a new ecological consideration the exhibition groups them under 5 headings

1/ The Plagiarists: (Nature as a model) those who look to nature to engineer man made and digital solutions.

2/ The New Artisans: (Nature as a co-worker) - those designers who are collaborating with nature to craft future consumer goods

3/ The Bio-Hackers: (Reprogrammed, ‘synthetic’ nature) designers working with synthetic biologists and who are engineering living organisms for a possible hybrid future

4/ The New Alchemists: (Hybridised nature) combining biological and chemical (non living) technology these designers merge robotics, chemistry and biology

5/ The Agents Provocateurs: (Conceptualised and imagined nature.) Pushing the boundaries to the extreme these designers explore the ethics around living technology as well as high-tech sustainability.

Alongside the exhibition ‘En Vie-Alive’ is hosting 4 designers and architects who are already working with synthetic biology or tissue engineering and has them set up in a lab style scenario showing the new tool kit for designers of the future - DNA and bacteria.

The jury is still out as to whether Milan was a great, or not so great year - I feel a bit disappointed overall but amongst some really bad design - Zona Tortona being particularly poor - there were some fantastic finds. One of the key materials that stuck out during the show was the abundance of marble and stone.

What was particularly beautiful about it was the blend between the rawness and beauty of nature that the material offers, combined with modern day tooling allowing for beautifully refined objects.

The marble bath that was on show as part of the Hybrids Architecture show at the University was particularly incredible as was the installation from Mathieu Lehanneur for the Bathing in Light marble installation at Superstudio

In contrast the combination of the organic exuberance of the glass captured within the refined marble structures at Osmosi by Emmanuel Babled in Lambrate were breathtaking in both scale, colour and proportion whilst the incredible curved marble sculptures at Wallpaper Handmade Milan by Michael Anastassiades and Henraux exemplified the beauty of when man and machine come together in design.