It sounded kind of far away when announced in 2013, but German renewable energy firm Ubitricity’s plan to convert street lamps to electric vehicle chargers is now underway in London, making it easy to plug in just about anywhere in the Hounslow borough of the city. Owners of electric vehicles simply order a custom charging cable featuring a built-in electricity meter so they can take advantage of the discreet power outlets built right into the lamp posts as well as standard electrical outlets.

You might be wondering what’s to stop random passersby from plugging whatever they feel like into the outlets. The answer is that little box, which communicates with the power company to activate charging from the light pole. The lights themselves were converted to LEDs to draw less power, making more available for other purposes.

The meter allows for remote billing, monitoring your usage and reimbursing the person or company the outlet belongs to, making it easier (and more polite) to juice up your vehicle whenever and wherever needed. You can keep track of how much power you’re drawing, and how much it costs, on a smartphone app. Ubitricity believes this setup will give potential electric car owners more confidence in their ability to take their vehicles on the road for longer trips.

The integration with existing city infrastructure also makes sense, especially in areas where there’s no room for permanent charging stations. The lamp posts are already there, and there’s already power running through them, so adding an outlet makes it possible to simply pull over to the side of the road to charge. Electric car owners in the area can request that outlets are added to lamp posts near their homes.

Employing natural processes to illuminate and warm interior spaces, this series of algae-based furnishings combines beautiful glass vessels and organic matter to create lovely yet functional home objects. Each fixture generates light, heat and oxygen using methods similar to those seen in bio-adaptive architectural facades.

Designed by Jacob Douenias and Ethan Frier (photos by Tom Little Photography LLC.), objects in the Spirulina series utilize cyanobacteria, “chosen for its rich green hue, light absorbency, and culinary qualities,” set in alkaline water and housed in shapely glass vessels. Found all over the world, this versatile algae can survive and thrive in all kinds of environments and is already widely used in other forms of biotechnology.

In this commissioned series, a set of spaces show off the various ways these organic home furnishings can be deployed in living and dining areas, popping up from tables, sprouting from walls, sitting on the floor or hanging from the ceiling. The various units are linked by a half mile of hidden plumbing and wiring and controlled via a concealed computer system that both analyzes results and controls each appendage.

Living Things is now installed at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania until March 27, 2016. While these experimental installations remain artistic prototypes for now, they and other similar endeavors continue to explore the range of near-future applications for organic matter in everyday domestic settings and built environments.

But how does it work? “The 3D printed nylon knobs embedded in the surface of this workstation actuate eighteen valves which allow for the harvesting of Spirulina when the culture becomes dense enough, and the supply of fresh liquid media to each vessel. Inside the cabinet the pumps, tubing, manifolds, LED drivers, air pumps, heater connections and filters which comprise the heart of the life support system”

More from its creators: “The morphologies of hand-blown glass vessels function both as lighting and heating elements for the human occupants, and high functioning photobioreactors which provide heat, light, agitation, air supply, nutrient and waste control to the living algae inside.”

Chances are good that if you keep your phone nearby while you’re working, you’re going to be tempted to pick it up every now and then, checking Instagram and sending texts. Get in the habit of doing it compulsively, and you’re sucking away a lot of time that you should probably spend focusing on the tasks at hand. This lamp by designer Weng Xinyu aims to solve that problem by forcing you to give up your phone in order to illuminate your desk.

Consisting of a balancing lamp pole on a simple wooden tripod, the lamp leans its light source to the desk when it’s turned off. If you want light, you’ll have to insert your phone into the slot on the end of the pole. This turns the light on automatically and balances the lamp to its proper position.

Sure, you could cheat and find some other object that fits into the slot so you don’t have to give up your precious smartphone. But as we all heard from authority figures throughout our childhoods, the only person you’d be cheating is yourself.

“Superfluous information is flowing from everywhere,” says Xinyu. “The sense of priority is fading, resulting a precarious Balance between work and amusement, true and virtual life. It is time we ask the question, what do we really want? ‘Balance’ might help us find the inner balance in this information exploding society.”

In ordinary circumstances, it would be fair to say that your paranoia levels are off the charts if you really think a nearby lamp is spying on you. But that might not be an accurate assessment anymore now that surveillance devices can be placed virtually anywhere – especially with the arrival of the Conversnitch. This cheap device looks like an ordinary light bulb, but it records the conversations of oblivious strangers and posts them on Twitter.

Artists Kyle McDonald and Brian House built the device for a mere $100 using Raspberry Pi and a microphone to record audio. It works anywhere with access to wifi. The text translation isn’t instantaneous, however; rather than using a talk-to-text translator, the artists pay to have the audio transcribed through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform. McDonalds, libraries, public parks, cafes – no place is safe.

Most of the overheard conversations are predictably banal. Snippets from the Conversnitch Twitter account include things like “I had the best dream this morning! It was about Eddie Vedder and we were swimming in a pool and in love.” “Did you eat any of my tater tots while I was gone? It sure looks like you did ’cause I couldn’t have eaten that many.”

The creators acknowledge that a device like this could be used for illegal purposes, and infringe upon privacy rights and expectations. They aim to stimulate conversation about how surveillance devices can disrupt what we believe should be private moments. But given that they provide full instructions to build your own cheap surveillance lamp, they’re making it disturbingly easy to disseminate devices that do just that.

Most home furnishings are made for flat surfaces, not for those uncomfortable edge conditions we call either ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ corners. The following designs do more than just address such conditions, they thrive on these traditionally-problematic challenges.

Kitchens are somewhat notorious when it comes to corners – cupboards bumping into another is one thing, but you also often lose the extra space contained in the corner itself. Not so with these crafty corner drawers that slide out at a 45-degree angle – designs by Blum and Heritage.

Floor lamps are another classic challenge- they are often rounded, and occupy more space in the corner than they could possible need. One solution is the Pop-Up corner light from WellWell, packed flat in an envelope with a cord, and folded out by the recipient to form a triangular, rectangular or round shape suited to 90-degree or even slightly-more-unusual angles.

For storage considerations, pipe shelves like the ones shown above have been popping up for sale on Etsy for a while now – these are generally oriented toward inside corners, but could just as easily wrap out and around as well. And, of course, you can buy something already-made or go the do-it-yourself route instead.

But inside corners are only half of the equation – what about outside corners, where two walls meet as they push out into the room? This corner shelf by Martina Carpelan fills both functions with elegant simplicity – it can be flipped to wrap around an outside corner, or to tuck into an inside one.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Edge Cases 8 Space Saving Design Ideas For Inside Corners