Summertime means there is excitement in the air, Pina Coladas in our hands, and of course beads of sweat on our forehead! As much as I love and thoroughly enjoy summer, I’m almost always on a mission to beat the heat. And with the pandemic bringing our unhealthy lifestyles and complete disregard of Mother Earth into focus, I try to do this in the most eco-friendly way possible. This collection of super cool and environment-conscious product designs will help you have the best summer, while also taking care of the planet. Have a fun and safe summer!
With summer comes an increase in usage of air conditioners and we know they are not exceptionally healthy for the planet. To help maintain the electricity usage, designers Aileen Ooi and E Ian Siew created an attachment to the common standing fan everyone has stashed away at their homes to make the room cooler. The attachment, named KYL is a humidity filter that funnels airflow output to cool a closed room. KYL would be able to lower temperatures by 1.5degrees Celsius and also make the room arider (a boon in humid places like Singapore, India, and more). Utilizing Bernoulli’s principle to create a cooling effect, KYL comes with a removable filter made up of tiny pieces of silica gel which absorbs moisture from the air. This lowers the humidity in the room and we can reuse the silica gel by washing it then leaving it out in the sun to dry, minimizing the usage of electricity.
A portable, wearable, air conditioner is no more a thing of futuristic TV shows. The Reon Pocket is a smartphone-controlled personal gadget that was designed to be compact and cool. It works using thermoelectric cooling and can cool the user’s body temperature by 13 degrees celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) and raise your temperature by about 8 degrees Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit). Reon sits on the base of your neck in a special undershirt designed for it. It uses the Peltier effect which means a temperature difference is created by applying a voltage between two electrodes connected to a sample of semiconductor material. The heat is absorbed or emitted when you pass an electrical current across a junction to either lower your temperature or increase it without bulk or noise.
Boasting an enameled steel construction, the Noori V02 AIRY is a multifunctional outdoor grill, pizza oven, rocket stove, and a fire pit – all in one! Not to mention, it’s probably one of the best-looking grills I’ve seen in a long time, it’ll be the perfect visual accessory to your backyard. The grill consists of six refractory concrete internal plates. These plates + an AIRY cylinder make up the grill’s innovative AIRY system (which also gives the product its name). This basically means that to set up an open fire, you simply need to remove a few refractory plates from within the AIRY cylinder, which instantly exposes the flames, creating the mesmerizing flame dance we all love to watch in an open fire! Much like its predecessor the Noori V02 AIRY also features a pizza disc, allowing you to not only bake up some pizzas but bread as well.
Eisner Design’s renovation pads the children’s basement playscape with cushioning from the floor to the ceiling to ensure rowdy and safe play. From the bookshelf to the tree swings, the designers at Eisner envisioned kids’ imagination and brought it to life. Stenciled between cubbies and bookshelves, Eisner Design lodged cushioned seats that work as hideouts tucked away from the action for when playtime gets too tiring. One shaped into a perfect circle and the other forming the shape of a lima bean, the new seating nooks offer kids their own midday nap destination, à la mom and dad. Rooted just in front of the seating nooks, a modular, cushioned playground is stationed next to an indoor tree trunk that can be used for climbing or as a base during games of tag. It’s the perfect spot for kids to spend their summers!
This beach umbrella comes with an origami-inspired design that unfolds to display a photovoltaic array that generates electric power which gets used for further refrigeration and cooling for the beach people. Measuring 2.5 meters high and a 3.2-meter diameter, this umbrella’s transformation brings to mind the mechanisms we see on the NASA spacecraft. The entire setup can be used individually or be rigged together to generate electricity that can even run an ice cream freezer on the beachside. It’s perfect for a private beach or even a luxury beach resort where these umbrellas can be deployed to keep the machines churning.
Staying cool in the summer can often pose a bit of a challenge, especially when it comes to maintaining a comfortable temperature whilst we are sat at our desks. Whilst there are solutions to this problem already, they often carry an undesirable, unconsidered, and mundane aesthetic that can interrupt the flow of our workspaces. Does this need to be the case? The team at BOUD certainly doesn’t think so, as they’ve created what could possibly be the cutest fan! The compact device features soft-rounded edges and oversized detailing to achieve a rather adorable aesthetic that gives it a friendly persona. But it isn’t ‘just a pretty face’, as it holds a rather clever and desirable feature… it can become handheld! Simply lifting the main section away from the base reveals a handle, this can now be used to provide a more directed stream of cool air.
Weighing 35 pounds, Yeti’s The V Series offers 50% better ice retention than its Tundra. And since the Tundra was as good as a cooler could get, we can assume that the V Series is going to be giving other coolers on the market an even stiffer competition. Sleek, with a retro appeal, the cooler has been equipped with cast-aluminum hinges that are guaranteed to last a lifetime and stainless steel handles. The usual double latches on coolers have been abandoned for a more convenient single center-mounted latch. 1.5 inches thick, it promises to hold 46 cans of beer, assuring you that your beverages will never run out!
We love the sounds and smells of sizing meat, we hate the clean-up afterward. To keep the ashes from spreading all over your party plans, designers Li Yuan & Zhou Yan have invented the FlameOn Barbecue Grill. It seems like there’s no easy way to remove the ash leftovers in your average charcoal/wood-fire grill. Rather than scoop out the soot or sift it out of the bottom (which inevitably ends up all over your hands and face), the FlameOn Barbecue Grill provides an all-new functionality that eliminates the mess factor. When you’re finished grilling and the device has cooled off, simply unlock the turning mechanism and tilt it on its side. The leftover ash will fall into a removable compartment for easy disposal. Better yet, in this position, it also takes up a smaller footprint than the average backyard barbecue.
Saiga is the result of a team project by the Royal College of Art & Imperial College London, Innovation Design Engineering students – Harry Barber, Kevin Chiam, Wei Haw Huang, and Nacho Vilanova. This wearable neck air conditioner makes use of conduction to cool down the area around the neck using the user’s own breath. So why did these mindful students design a prototype that needs very negligible external battery power? For a simple reason – the air conditioners are energy demanding and adversely affect the environment as they increase the environmental temperature and are also polluting in the long run. How one feels around the neck contributes a lot to the perception of environmental temperature, and the Saiga neck wearable does exactly that.
Nothing says summer is here like a chilled drink and a cactus-themed celebration to support it. Holding your munchies while you sip through the straw, the Cacnuts is a must-have for every green lover.
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