Bristle-In Shelf

That old push broom is not just for collecting dust bunnies, but for now collecting your clutter. Elevating a classic utilitarian item to a modern organizational tool, the bristle-In Shelf allows for simple display, customizable storage, and unique decorative addition to any room. Through eye hooks embedded into the bristle holes, each shelf can be easily wall mounted into any environment with two anchored screws. The bristles provide structural support laterally while remaining pliable enough to vertically support smaller items such as pencils, scissors, flowers and much more.

Design by Brittani Czarnecki and Maggie Matela
bczarnec(at)gmail(dot)com
www.maggiematela.com

Cereal Design Napkin Rings

Paper products are the single biggest component of the municipal solid waste stream, making up 38% of the material put in landfills every year in the United States.

This pair of napkin rings is a concept that profits from the high availability of paperboard. Made from 1 cereal box the result is a simple design that takes advantage of the uniqueness of the graphics when abstracted on each face and highlights the beauty where the layers come together.

Design by Ann Stepanek
www.annstepanekdesign.com

Cloth Napkins

These napkins are all unique. They were created with scrap material — half to quarter yards, and odd bits of cotton and linen saved in my closet. From the remnants of past projects rectangular pieces were assembled.

A person was approached and asked to cut out any shape desired, for barder. Some people instantly began to cut with the scissors I provided, while others used chalk to lay out their design, meticulously planning it. Still others asked to take the fabric home, so they could think about it. Recognizable shapes were made, as well as abstract ones: one person responded to the color for her design; another traced the shadow his hat made. They are all different shapes and sizes. These pieces were then sewn together and finished by me. A photograph of each person is incorporated into the tag, along with their name.

My approach is about two levels of creative expression: the creative labor working to produce a product and the creative labor that manages it. The result is to challenge the uniformity of an existing product by giving those two levels their own space for expression: one individual and, when assembled together, a collective.

Design by Sara Dierck
www.saradierck.com

Salvage stool

Salvage stool explores the blurred lines between trash and treasure.The stool is made from wood reclaimed from discarded shipping pallets. At first glance, the pallets look like rough scraps of waste timber, but closer inspection reveals white and red oak and cherry wood. The wood gains value from its patina, the stamps and brands that reveal its industrial heritage. It is a rare case of upcycling, material that gains an aesthetic value after its initial functional lifespan.

The seat of the stool is inlaid with flecks of gold that contrast with the roughness of the wood and augment the preciousness of the material. Gold is rarely thought of as waste, but like the pallets, the gold in this piece was also bound to be discarded — it was salvaged from the bottom of a Goldschlager bottle.

Design by Ingrid Fetell
www.ingridfetell.com

Rubber Band Lamp

Lamp made of rubber bands and a rain gutter cover, to keep common household items out of the garbage.

Design by Heidi Patterson
www.heidipatterson.blogspot.com

You can’t take it with you

You can’t take it with you is a conceptual exploration of what happens to our things at the end of their life cycle. Many things are made to last, but their material lasts long beyond their functional or aesthetic value. These lampshades, on the other hand, are designed to degrade completely on their own schedule.

Like the memos in Mission Impossible, the paper in these lampshades is programmed to self-destruct. Treated with a strong acid, the fibers slowly dissolve, leaving a kind of organically-created lace that gives each shade its own unique beauty.

Design by Ingrid Fetell
www.ingridfetell.com

Seaflect

The sensuous undulating forms in this stool are inspired by musical performance and represents the balance between the presence that a performer commands with that of their ability to give a specific amount of themselves during their performance, to keep fans coming back for more and more. There is no specific front or back, beauty is seen on all sides and allows for different height users for more universal use.

The legs are made from bamboo and finished with a non-toxic stain. The seat and foot-rest are of scrap stainless steel. They were cut and welded in trade for repair of welding jackets. Everything is fastened together with sex-bolts making this easily dissembled and all of the parts re-used, or put back into the earth.

Design by Kathleen Scully
www.scullynewyork.com

Rebar Knife

I forged this knife from scrap rebar, of which there is an abundance to be found around New York City. The handle and pins were also scrap. Transforming such raw materials into a useful, durable object for the table at no cost was deeply satisfying. The equilibrium between the handle and the blade when the knife is placed upright on its bottom horizontal axis represents a measured approach to making objects. Waste is not tolerated.

Design by Nina Damario
ninadamario(at)gmail(dot)com

Poof Lamp

The future of lighting is changing. All over the world, traditional incandescent bulbs are being replaced with lower wattage substitutes, like compact fluorescents, and LEDs. The energy saving switch-over has effects on materials that have gone unnoticed.

Without the intense heat radiated by incandescent bulbs, lower wattage bulbs allow for a whole new array of materials for use as shades and fixtures. The poof lamp is a shade designed with the intention of using a light-weight, low cost material, in this case a shower poof. The material is unraveled, and transformed into tubular shapes that diffuse light when layered upon each other. It is the bulb that allows for the material, otherwise the plastic mesh would easily warp and melt.

Design by David Steinvurzel
David(dot)Steinvurzel(at)gmail(dot)com

Majority Plate

While shopping at my local Salvation Army, I came across this plate, I thought about what food I might eat off of it, pancakes with fresh, seasonal berries and dripping syrup for breakfast, my lunch-time grilled organic vegetable sandwiches with whole-wheat bread, or my dinner, of wild salmon with russet potatoes and broccoli rabe from the local green market. These are foods I might have eaten, but not now with the current economic crisis, I find it more inspiring to look at the couple who went a month eating on a dollar a day and see how close I can get to that. Oatmeal, peanut butter on homemade bread, rice and beans, eaten everyday for a month sounds boring, if not borderline malnutrition.

Variations in our diet help to build antibodies against disease and metabolize for proper absorption of nutrients.

In striking contrast to what I have available to me, is the overwhelming majority of the world’s population, whom live on the equivalent of a US dollar a day, or less, for all of basic life essentials: food, clothing and shelter. In countries, such as Ethiopia an entire five or six person family can eat for just over a dollar for an entire week. Much of the world’s population does not have proper access to grains other than corn or rice, and even when they do they are often rat infested. Proteins like fish and poultry are almost non-existent, leading to malnutrition; women cannot produce enough milk to feed their children which dominoes into stunted growth in nearly 50% of the children in third-world countries.

The design on this plate represents the diet of the majority.

Design by Kathleen Scully
www.scullynewyork.com