Swedish design agency, Tomorrow Machine has developed a biodegradable bottle made from a potato starch-based material that can be peeled away like fruit skin and then eaten or dissolved in water.
The concept is being developed with global company Eckes Granini for its juice brand Brämhults.
Crayola Beauty has teamed up with Asos to create is a new vegan, a cruelty-free make up line aimed at 20-somethings.
The collection uses Crayolas playful heritage. The majority of the products come in a stick formula similar to brands like Nudestix, Milk Makeup, and Nars, who all stock easy-to-use chubby pencil-inspired cosmetics.
Among the products are:
95 total shades.
24 shades of stick foundation.
five palettes (three eye, one face, and one color changing lipstick).
cheek crayons.
mascaras.
makeup brushes.
Brandless
Are we paying too much for brands?
One company that is looking to revolutionize our thinking about branded goods is Brandless, a San Francisco based start-up selling food and household goods.
The emphasis is more on the goods rather than the brand with the argument that consumers pay a brand tax of approximately 40% for the privilege of consuming a particular brand. Brandless’s CEO and co-founder Tina Sharkey says “we’re trying to reimagine what it means to be a brand in today’s world, a brand rooted in authenticity, transparency, and trust,” Sharkey says. “If we do this right we’re actually building a community of people who want to change the way we live, where we can focus on living more and branding less.”
https://brandless.com/about
Coloni, is a Swedish based gardening house founded in 2010. In collaboration with a horticulturist, Coloni has developed an approach to a new kind of indoor gardening based on seed mixtures composed from a conceptual point of view. The mixtures consist of seeds from desert and arid Mediterranean climates and include both annual and perennial species.
Their philosophy is to make indoor gardening an engaging part of one´s everyday life; an activity to create a relationship to and to follow in its different stages of development.
Sugarcane has been used for the first time in packaging by Bulldog skincare. The green polyethylene is created by farming sugarcane on sustainable land in Brazil, thousands of miles from the Amazon rainforest. Whilst being cultivated, the sugarcane captures CO2 from the air as it grows. Sugarcane is so efficient at capturing CO2 that every kilogram of green plastic produced 3.09 kilograms of CO2 is removed from the air. Once grown the sugarcane is transformed into 'ethanol' a type of alcohol, which in turn is used to Bulldog's partner Braskem to create green plastic. Kudos Bulldog.
Designers have invented an edible water bottle that uses algae and a process borrowed from the molecular gastronomy industry. The holy grail of the bottled water industry - this prototype titled The Ooho has been created by Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, Pierre Paslier and Guillaume Couche. It works by holding water inside a transparent membrane that can be made in different sizes.
The technique itself is not new and was infact first developed by scientists in 1946 but was popularised again when El Bulli chef Ferran Adria used it for his unique recipes. Called spherification its a method of shaping liquids into spheres.
The flexible skin around the water is edible and made up of a combination of calcium chloride and brown algae and according to the designers is resistant, hygienic and biodegradable.
Continuing the theme around future synthetic cosmetics and beauty care, Lucy Mcrae has released her latest film in collaboration with Nowness exploring her swallowable parfum concept. Similarly to Amy Congdon the relationship between synthetic biology and cosmetics is a growing area of exploration for designers and scientist. As Lucy describes in her accompanying interview , “We are living in an era of no rules; technology is corrupting nature’s ballot, forcing us to redefine our bodies’ limitations and boundaries,” Lucy believes that in the not too distant future we will be eating our cosmetics to enhance our skin luminosity, colour and scent.
Speculative designer Amy Congdon considers a future where biotechnology will give designers a new set of materials and tools to work with. Believing that future materials will be grown from cells she suggests a range of jewellery that is grown from our bones, skin and cartilage. Envisioning a future 2082 her ‘Bio Nouveau’ collection replaces cosmetic surgery with tissue engineered disposable biological atelier pieces. In order to care for these semi living body adornments she has created a fictional range of body care products that include Graft Moisturiser & tone, SynSkin treatment and Graft Aftercare and Bioskin glue.
Personalised service subscription box experiences have been making waves for a while with consumers looking for unique and personal with the likes 'not another bill' and Bluum, but the latest in the bespoke offerings comes out of a necessity rather than a desire which will make it a huge success. pillpack is a full service pharmacy that ships prescribed medications to customers doors in personalised individual packs that are organised by date and time. Keeping everything simple and personal the box pack uses simple infographics indicating medication type and helps the users navigate their way through what can be a complicated cocktail of drugs.
Lapka is a collection of smart sensors which plug into your iphone and give you a visual representation of your envrionment. Initially released during CES the consumer electronics show in las Vegas earlier this year, it is now being showcased with its delicious minimalist and emotive packaging that fits entirely with the wood detailing on the product itself.
This beautiful range of packaging for athletes has caught our collective eye at Future-Filter. The successful blend of pastel colours, minimalist geometric illustration and sans serif type almost makes us want to take up running!
Soon to be graduating from Central St Martins, Textile Futures Course, Amy Radcliffe has designed an analogue device that captures scents that can later be retrieved to exist as an olfactory memory of a time and a place. Questioning 'How can we archive personal memories through captured scent?' Amy is drawing parallels to the way that we consumed our memories through photography in a pre digital era drawing comparisons with lomography and 35mm film. Photographs were precious and faded with time.
Utilising the Headspace Technology to capture 'scents' Amy's project explores the poetic narrative of the time it takes to capture the scent and considers how in the future we will 're-experience the moment' through the emotions that a scent captures.
Her device is beautifully crafted using ceramics, leather and blown glass - all skills that she has acquired during the project to enable her to develop a sensitively designed analogue system that would allow us to capture scents - one that could in turn profoundly change the way we experience scents in our daily life engaging with our memories in an entirely new way.
Titled 'Madeleine' Amy makes reference to Proust and his works 'In search of lost time' where explores he the experience of 'Involuntary Memory' - one that Amy believes her device will elicit.
With the desire for Happiness being a key trend we are seeing a plethora of Happiness apps, guidelines on how to make your employees more happy and so on. In this vein we love the "Happiness Brewery" from the Happiness Factory. Described as being like a beer which contains the best parts of your past, the feelings you can no longer have...they try to recreate a personal moment that they then bottle and send to you to capture that fleeting moment of happiness.
