All you need is Mormor

Despite the retro look mormor.nu (grandma.now) is a business idea of the future. This Danish webshop selling hand knitted children's clothes made by organic alpaeca has no employee younger than 68. Suddenly older growing populations and higher getting unemployment rates seem like problems with solutions.

9 gram toilet

Resignation is a word that doesn’t appeal to Swedish architect Anders Wilhelmson. It was while listening to Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas during a seminar that he made up his mind. When Koolhaas told about a helicopter travel over Lagos and said that architects can only look at the world, not change it, some kind of rage started to grow inside of Wilhelmson. ”There must be something beyond this resignation”, he thought, and that was the start of "Peepoo", a sanitarian solution for the poorest.
Architects usually want to solve problems by building. But people in the slum build their houses themselves and have more urgent needs. Like toilets. "Peepoo" is a nine gram mini sewage treatment works which has being tested in Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s a little plastic, biodegradable bag which transforms the faeces into fertiliser with a market value. Way to go, Wilhelmson!

Photo: Peepeople/Camilla Wirseen

Ray of light

A traditional quality producer get hold of an innovative designer. Then things like this happen. Candles are candles, you might say. More or less, I would argue. These ones could easily pass for table figurines. “Aurora” is a self introduced project by Swedish designer Monica Förster, who sometimes likes to get away from all the restrictions connected to her usual job as a furniture designer. The candle producer Liljeholmens exists since 1839 and admit they had to think twice before making these candles. The wick has to be placed exactly in the middle of the candle, to make the candle burn without dripping. The first limited edition sold out in two days. But there will soon be other opportunities.

Material world (chapter 1)

Products using sustainable, non-polluting materials is the vision of Biobiq, a Danish material company established in 2007 by designer icon Arne Jacobsen’s nephew Jacob Jacobsen. Biobiq is a biologically based sandwich composite consisting of thermoplastic biopolymers and nature fibres such as jute, flax, sisal and hemp. According to the company a kind of semi-manufactured product that easily applies to the production of 3D-designs: shell chairs, for example. A chip that, when heated up, softens allowing moulding by pres. The technology is developed by Risø National Laboratory of Sustainable Energy at the Technical University of Denmark and the Biobiq team has big plans for the United Nations Climate Change Conference “Cop 15” In Copenhagen in November.

Grand danois

Interested in the “how:s?” and “why:s?” behind furniture classics? Check out this site (in Danish), describing the processes behind products like the Ant by Arne Jacobsen, the PH-lamp by Poul Henningsen and the Panton Chair by Verner Panton.

Lisa Larson’s cookies

If Lisa Larson’s figurines aren’t sustainable craft, I don’t know what is. Ask the Japanese, they’re crazy about this Swedish ceramist in her seventies. So crazy they will even bake cookies in her honour. These will be sold at an upcoming book release and exhibition in Daikanyama, Tokyo, March 20th to April 1st. Go, Lisa, go.

The Swan as we know it

You might think you’ve seen a lamp like this before. But you haven’t. “Disc”, designed by Dos Architects and produced by Örsjö, is not only the first electric fitting in Sweden, but the first in Scandinavia, to get the ecolabel The Swan. It is, of course, made for low-energy bulbs, and part of the metal and glass it is made of, is reused. “Disc” is also designed to simplify the process of separating the glass from the metal once it’s ready for the garbage dump. Or rather, once it’s ready to become a new product.