Sally Dominguez

If you are in Australia today is the day to scour the corners of your closet for that elusive red clothing and show your support for RedR Australia.  If you, like me, find the colour red is anathema to your complexion then you, like me, will have to suck it up for the day to make your point.  

RedR Australia maintains a register of professionals who are on hand to attend emergencies around the region.  its yet another humbling example of engineers going beyond the call of duty to make things happen.  So wear red!!  

I am cleaning the detris layers on my filing shelf and finding so many interesting articles...this one is interesting for its content but also its graphic.

Years ago I would read designboom.com every week, studying their competitions until I finally found one that pushed my buttons.  The challenge was a bathroom for the future - or a bathroom appliance, I cant quite remember - and I was in the thoes of designing the inwall shower-to-toilet recycling unit, titled reWASH and using a ferris wheel-like structure with internal "cars" filled with zeolite to filter the water to flushable standard.  reWASH would eventually morph into my Rainwater H2OG tank - but I digress.
Completely keyed up with my brilliant inwall filtration device I designed a modular "plug-in" bathroom that took shower and sink water to a toilet "wall" for processing and use as the toilet flush, and I expressed this process in a flowing visual made from a resin product like Corian.  Come to think of it, I think the challenge was to design a bathroom appliance using Corian.....
Anyhoo - because I cant draw on computer I even paid an industrial designer friend to draw my concept up in 3D.  I was SO SURE that I would win.  Here it is:

So - I didnt win.  I didnt even get a mention.  Devastated and broker than before, I logged off and stopped visiting.

But now - there is THIS!  Thank you Inhabitat for opening my eyes to a seriously terrific and useful design brought into being by a designboom competition.  Israeli designer Yael Livneh designed the TwoGO back in 2010 for a Seoul Bike competition on Designboom and hey - Yael didnt win either!  Crazy.  Check it out.

HOLD THE BOAT!!  I have just found the original bathroom competition!!  IT was 2004 - and here is the winner Tom Jonkers from Belgium with his all-inclusive floating egg...

stay tuned for a rundown....meanwhile here are some pix of a week that included torrential downpour, significant debate and some fantastic hotlaps in the fabulously-bodied Jag supercar and the Merc C63 AMG!

No ordinary bicycle for me at Burning Man this year - instead I got to trial a Diggler Elite: a rugged, well-sprung, all-terrain electric scooter.  The dirt on the playa varies according to the weather and usage - towards the end of the week it is heavy soft sand, when a water truck passes it is inpenetrable mud, and for the rest of the time its generally hardpacked but with sneaky pits of soft stuff to bog the unsuspecting cyclist distracted by sculpture and spectacle.
I was able to successfully Diggle in all but the wettest mud and it was FUN - the electric battery charges up fairly fast - which is lucky becos the scooter itself, laden with old-skool batteries - is no fun to push.  The hub mounted motor pushes out 750 watts and best of all the Diggler glides for ages - at least 120 metres on the playa - which not only saves power but is really exciting.  It was invented to replicate the sensation of skiing, snowboarding and mountainbiking in a human/motor all-terrain hybrid.  Get down low over the superwide handlebars, thumb on the throttle, and gliding across the wide open playa is laugh-out-loud fun!

So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that a friend will be importing Digglers to Australia....and you can imagine my frustration when, in writing my review for the DRIVE section of Fairfax papers, I realized that these "two wheeled recreational devices" are banned from all public roads and footpaths...along with Segways!  Since Segway technology and similar balancing innovations form the core of many new concepts for urban commuter propulsion - like the GM/Segway P.U.M.A. project and others - I am curious as to how Australia is planning to implement sustainable transport strategies into its cities.  Not all of us want to hike up our work gear and ride a bike - sometimes a stand-up option makes way more sense.  I have just written a fairly chunky review/criticism for Fairfax which will run in their Drive Bike liftout soon.  Stay tuned for fallout!

I am almost ready to launch a new range of consumer products and I have been obsessed with containing them in recycled content plastic bottles.  It seems crazy not to be using recycled plastic when the contents are not for consumption...and even more crazy that I cant find any suppliers of such bottles in Australia.  BUT I have just found a company in the USA who can do up to 100% recycled HDPE content in opaque white bottles - and if I have my way it will start a similar trend down under.
Another curious observation about dealing with the packaging industry - many of the sales people seem to be repeating a tired and generally incorrect line: that bottles cannot be recycled if they have paper labels on them.  Bizarre if you just stop to think that in order to melt the plastic into reusable pellets it needs to be heated to way higher than the burn temperture of plastic.....
Anyhoo on my internet trawling to seek out kindred green bottle companies I came across Mike Biddle, "The Garbage Man" who has cut across the confusion by using mining industry high tech to efficiently sort and recycle plastic waste and "fluff".  Check out his TED talk here:

Periodically I google Cork just to see what designers are doing with one of my favourite tactile materials.  I am still waiting to bump into a friendly patron-like cork supplier who wants to give me some play cork to experiment with. 

Jasper Morrison is a designer with a thing for cork and he has several covetable stools on the market including these little rotund earth-coloured beauties for Moooi.

Up there on the left is another Jasper Morrison, this time for Vitra.  Its "Stool A".  On the right is a designer I have only just found - Daniel Michalik and his beautiful layered cork forms.  Design Within Reach run an annual cork design competition where would-be-corkies make chair designs from a champagne cork.  I am not allowed to enter because I am one of their designers - lucky because intricate craft is really not my thing!  Below is the judges pick for this years Cork Competition:

And click on the image here for a terrific overview from the Inhabitat site on how cork is made.

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Check out this cool design that landscape architect Jim Davidge has planning for Parking Day this Friday in SF!  Note judicious use of Rainwater HOG tanks.....

I am currently in the Napa Valley as a guest of Mercedes, driving the SLK 350 fitted with their new myCOMAND (not a typo just an unfortunately wrong-looking acronym) social interface system.
Johann Jungwirth, CEO of Benz R&D North Amercia walked us through the four social trends ID'd by his group as the keys to understanding the digital lifestyle revolution:
* the constant connection that means we are "always on";
* "Simplexity" - the demand for intuitive, efficient and aesthetic interfaces - the hallmark of Apple;
* "Innovation acceleration" as demonstrated by the disruptive business practices of some of Silicon Valley's best known social network phenomenons; and
*social networking and the ability to effect rapid change from bottom up empowerment best evidenced by the soclal uprisings in some of the Arab countries this year.

We visited Google - always a highlight! - and learned what it meant to be googly.....and with a couple of minor nav mishaps that are to be ironed out before the November launch and bunch of German journalists and I made it across the Golden Gate Bridge to Napa.

On my afternoon hillside walk I rounded a wooded corner straight onto - what looked at first glance like a battered and testosterone-upsized version of Marc Newsom's concept Ford....

but what turned out to be a rather spectacular (underneath a fairly chunky patina of age) orange and white rendition of the 1974 Winnie Wagon.

Unfortunately this advert doesnt show the futuristic moulded tail that wraps like a handlebar moustache right around the rear window in a sinuous extruded shelf...desperate to know more about this vehicle I dragged the dog homeward and looked it up.  A rare beast - not many for sale and not many images online either...

you can get a sense of the moulded rear in this shot (kids get out of the way!!).  And I found one online for sale - in Tennassee, for $2500.  VERY tempting.
In an ignoble ending a google of Winnie wagon reveals an inelegant folding wire shopping trolley bearing the name and a host of ugly images.  I am on a quest to learn more about the Winnie Wagon.  Stay tuned.....