Plastic piping original mass-produced to carry water from place to place has found a likewise liquid-related second life in the form of flower-holding vessels, blown out like glass into fresh new shapes.

Adapting traditional glass-blowing techniques, Japanese artist Kodai Iwamoto has created a series of signature vases that still show elements of their past lives, including production stamps. The above video illustrates the creative process.

The expansion process also naturally deforms these stamps as well as the coloration of the pipes, creating a variety of hues and details showing the origin of each piece. Custom effects, like vertical ridges, can be achieved by creating slatted formwork (then sliding the tube inside, so when it deforms its shape is informed by the slats).

This ‘Ex-Portation’ series explores the intersection of everyday object reuse and handicraft, turning cheap and available materials toward a new beautiful and functional purpose.

More about the process: “by applying air pressure into a closed pipe,” the artist “then slowly warmed the pipe with a heater to make it soft and moldable. As with glass blowing, many factors such as the shape of the mold, air-pressure and the speed of heating the pipe’s surface affect the shape of an object.”

The whole process is remarkably straightforward, which is part of its beauty — ordinary people can follow this artist’s lead and use simple technology to craft similar works from local scraps.

Looking at everyday built environments with an eye toward artistic adaptation, Oakoak turns exhaust pipes into elephant trunks, wild shrubs into micro-farms and more.

Pablo Picasso’s famous Don Quixote drawing, for instance, pops off the drawing board, wielding an antenna and prepared to tilt at chimneys on top of an old building.

Oakoak has a knack for seeing the hidden potential in planters, pipes manhole covers and other overlooked elements found on, around and above city streets.

An urban planner in a previous professional life, he is used to taking stock of everything around him, including those things that are rarely included in artistic endeavors, like fence post and fruit weeds.

Anything from a crooked cinder block to an ephemeral beam of light falling across the street can inspire a playful interactive scene by this quirky French interventionist, making passersby stop on the sidewalk for a moment to smile.

Starting with name-brand versions of popular products found in virtually any home, this designer has come up with a series of clever solutions to eliminating the waste from each package system on a case-by-case basis.

Aaron Mickelson took on this challenge as a master’s thesis project at the Pratt Institute, asking (and answering) the question: can any product be truly garbage-free, leaving little or nothing unused in its wake? The strategies employed here are also potentially versatile – each could be applied to a type or category of packaging (and would-be trash).

The bag of garbage bags design for GLAD products is fairly straightforward, to the point where one has to wonder why they are not using this strategy already: the last bag contains the rest of the bags, both to make it functional as a bag itself but also to leave it as a reminder to buy more bags (which you can see coming thanks to it being partially transparent as well).

The laundry (or dish) pods for Tide are designed to dissolve in water, leaving nothing behind that you need to take out of the wash, obviating the need for a container entirely.

The OXO pop containers feature soap-soluble ink that breaks down when you wash it, taking the branding materials with it and leaving you with an all-purpose container. As a bonus: these could also come pre-loaded with food rather than simply sold as containers, too, allowing you to buy products then keep the plastic boxes for other uses.

The Nivea bar of soap comes in a septic-safe dissolving paper wrapper that you can bring into the shower or bath with you and not have to worry about throwing out, eliminating a step as well as reducing landfill.

Finally, this Twining tea bag variant eliminates the wax lining that typically prevents composting and instead integrates each tea packet directly into the compost-friendly packaging design that unfolds like an accordion for use.

They say great design is in the details, so what would happen if you were to twist a key element here or tweak a core feature there? As it turns out, rendering an item relatively frustrating (but still functional) is quite easy and at times fairly humorous as well.

In an ongoing series dubbed The Uncomfortable, Katerina Kamprani “decided to create and design for all the wrong reasons. The goal is to redesign useful objects making them uncomfortable but usable and maintain the semiotics of the original item. Vindictive and nasty? Or a helpful study of everyday objects?”

Much of her work deals with the most common items we use everyday, from tableware and cookware to keys and chairs, each recognizable but distorted, usable but difficult.

Adding hinges and chains to spoons, forks and knives readily defeats their purpose, as does bending the handle on a mug or adding a nose-bumping extrusion to a wine glass. While the works are conceptual renderings, some are for sale as art prints and many others could be 3D printed as gag gifts, too.

Like so many secret spaces of New York City, this one-room exhibit space (hidden inside an abandoned elevator) is not exactly on the beaten path.

This pop-up project is naturally camouflaged, set behind a pair of rusted metal doors along an inconspicuous alley between a pair of dull gray block walls. Only a few small rectangular punched openings suggest that something might lurk beyond the black steel.

Behind its unmarked entry lies a surprisingly pristine white room lined with red-padded shelves. These in turn support an array of contents, many of which city dwellers may find strangely familiar.

The Elevator Museum‘s collection sports a sampling of everyday urban objects, from discarded coffee cups and potato chip bags to tip jars, found dollar bills and losing lottery tickets.

The exhibits rotate, however, between temporary pieces and a permanent collection featuring some seriously unique and one-off objects. The latter includes the shoe infamously thrown at President George W. Bush during a televised 2008 press conference.

The museum founders Alex Kalman, and brothers Benny and Josh Safdie “want [the] museum to relay the intimate stories behind strange, colloquial items, finding beauty in absurdity.” To construct their secret museum, “the team gutted the shaftway [at the ground floor] and renovated it to include lighting and shelving.”

It has operating hours, but like most things in NYC, it is worth dropping by any time of the day or night: “Glass peepholes at the door allow passersby to marvel at the collectibles 24/7, and for those visitors who miss the museum’s opening hours, a toll free hotline has been developed that relays information about each exhibited artifact via phone. The 60 square-foot, free museum also accommodates a cafe and shop. It is a fitting microcosm of the essence of New York City, an unusual myriad of characters, quirks, and curiosities congregating in extremely small spaces.”