At the School of Visual Arts, Core77's own Allan Chochinov challenged students on his 3D Design course to redesign the first thing they threw out after class. Finding herself chucking an empty tube of toothpaste, Lebonese design student Leen Sadder sprang into action, busily researching the history of toothpaste and its relationship to the toothbrush.
Leen soon stumbled upon the "Miswak"; a cleansing twig of the Salvadora persica tree, used for the purposes of teeth cleaning throughout the Middle-East and Asia for millennia. Recognizing the sustainability-potential of eliminating both the toothbrush and paste, Leen's intriguing "THIS" concept aims to package and promote the Miswak as an organic and biodegradable alternative to the Western teeth cleansing routine.
Acknowledging the difficulty of ingratiating a Western audience to her twigs, Leen included a clever cigar-cutter-like lid to her packaging concept—the bark traditionally being stripped to the brush like fibres with a bit of good old fashioned chewing.
Although we still can't see the Miswak taking off in the 21st century West, Miss Sadder's concept certainly gives us a critical perspective on the teeth-cleaning industry—masters of manufactured demand that they could be accused of being.
Over on Shapeways, community member and rubik's puzzle fanatic Oskar van Deventer has been turning a few heads with his, apparently world-record breaking, 17x17x17 Rubik's cube. This marvel took 15 hours for Oskar to produce; first 3D printing the parts and then dying and assembling the 1539 pieces by hand.The...
Herman Miller's currently running not one, but two promotional prize giveaways. The first is Twitter-based, and so low-effort you've got no reason not to try: "Simply tweet a TwitPic to @hermanmiller with the hashtag #liveunframed that shows how you 'live unframed.' The picture can be of anything, and entries close...
With shamefully similar logos and like hi-tech aesthetics, you could be forgiven for assuming Kenwood the kitchen appliance company and Kenwood the audio device company are one and the same. After reading this article about the original Kenwood Chef kitchen mixer from 1950, I thought it miraculous that they had...
Designed for the Japanese curry restaurant chain, CoCo Ichibanya, nendo introduces the "forest-spoon." The team hoped to design a spoon that would be fun -- even when not in use. A single "forest-spoon" looks like a tree. When assembled together, even the youngest curry-eater will see the forest from the...
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