Published: April 5, 2009
LONDON — Some words just wear themselves out. They are used — or misused — so often that they lose their meaning. “Design” is one, “creative” is another, and if I see “contemporary” used to describe one more stick of furniture that looks as if it has been sequestrated from a 1980s porn palace, I will scream.
Vitra
The Vegetal chair, designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. As the economic and environmental crises deepen, there is a growing recognition that many aspects of our lives need to be reinvented.
gDiapers
When the gDiaper, which consists of a biodegradable insert worn inside a pair of underpants, is soiled, you can flush it down t
he toilet. If it is only wet, you can compost it and it will decompose within a few months.A recent recruit to the endangered list is “innovation.” Once hailed as a panacea, it has been so diminished by hyperbole that it risks seeming irrelevant. (“Transformation” is the fashionable favorite to replace it.) Yet just like “design” and “contemporary,” “innovation” is losing credibility as a word at the very time when it is needed most urgently.
As the economic and environmental crises deepen, there is a growing recognition that many aspects of our lives need to be reinvented. Politicians routinely call for the “redesign” of society, and urge businesses to “innovate” their way out of recession. This readiness to embrace change — even radical change — coupled with advances in science and technology, is unleashing a stream of innovations. Here are some of the most exciting ones.
1. Old-school innovation
When most people imagine design innovation, they think of designers experimenting with new technologies to develop new products, which will be better than their predecessors. That is exactly what the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec did with their Vegetal Chair for the Swiss company Vitra, which seems set to be a highlight of the Milan Furniture Fair later this month.
The Bouroullecs’ aim was to create a plastic chair that looked as if it had sprouted like a plant. They did so by molding the seat in the shape of a basket of twigs. The spaces between each “twig” make the Vegetal seem light and airy, and form holes through which the legs can be inserted to stack the chairs on top of each other.
The result is a great example of “old-school” innovation, and the most complex chair that Vitra’s engineers have ever produced. (That is saying something, given that they spent more than 20 years struggling to adapt Verner Panton’s S-shaped Panton Chair for mass-production.)
2. Green innovation
Whereas “old school” innovations tend to focus on making existing products easier to use or more efficient, a new goal is to make them environmentally responsible. A great example is gDiaper, the flushable baby diaper now sold in North America.
Conventional disposable diapers are an eco-nightmare. They are the third largest contributors to landfill sites in North America, with some 50 million being discarded each day. They take up to 500 years to decompose, and (here comes the yukky bit) the “contents” can seep into the ground water system, and contaminate it.
When Jason and Kimberly Graham-Nye were expecting their first child, they searched for an eco-friendly diaper and eventually found a company in Tasmania that had invented one. They bought the rights to the design and refined it into the gDiaper, which consists of a biodegradable flushable worn inside a pair of underpants. When the flushable is soiled, you can flush it down the toilet, or, if it is simply wet, use it as compost in the garden, where it will decompose within a few months.
3. New-school innovation
No sooner did Apple’s iPhone go on sale than amateur innovators started to invent applications for it. Thousands have surfaced. Among them is a dual innovation, which is also an exciting departure for music. It is Bloom, an interactive music system developed for the iPhone and Apple’s other touch-screen devices by the musicians Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers.
The first thing to say about Bloom is that it is fun. If you tap on your screen, you will see a splash of color rippling across it and hear a note of music that sounds like a gently rung bell. Tap it again, and you will cue a different hue and note. Do nothing, and a random sequence appears on the screen. The images and sounds then repeat until they fade into nothingness.
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