This smart purifier will elevate your air quality and home interior

With every passing year, we are seeing the effects of pollution seep deeper into our lives. Earlier it would only affect your health if you spent too much time outdoors, especially in an urban setting, but now we are learning that the air indoor can be 5x more polluted than outside. While a long term solution is adopting a sustainable lifestyle, you can make changes in your immediate environment overnight with appliances like air purifiers to improve the air quality for your health. Air purifiers are generally not something we consider as an accent piece in our homes but Air O, a conceptual air purifier, is here to change that.

Air purifiers have slowly become essentials in homes after the US EPA and WHO stated that PM2.5 indoors air quality is more toxic than outdoor air. It prompted people to monitor their living spaces, especially those with existing conditions like asthma or families with newborns. In addition to appliances, people also get indoor plants to naturally purify the air, but having both take up space and increases maintenance. Air O is the perfect fusion of a purifier and a planter that not only frees up and make corners of your home look tidy, it also gives your interior style a minimalistic upgrade. You can control Air O through an app on your smartphone and get timely reports on the air quality or notifications about changing the filters.

The designer’s idea to combine plants with an air purifier was like adding a turbocharger to make the appliance perform better while retaining the soothing presence of plants. The appliance is designed to look like a luxury plant holder with pineapple-like grooves that add texture to the otherwise matte black gadget. Air O’s sleek make it a perfect fit in any space and you won’t have to worry about a bulky air purifier being an eyesore in your home. Also, the plant really elevates the environment apart from having emotional benefits. I bet no one will be able to tell its an air purifier and they’ll assume you are a real adult now with real thriving plants in your home – nice feeling, isn’t it?

Designer: Sheng-Wen Wang

This article was sent to us using the ‘Submit A Design’ feature.

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Modular lego-inspired furniture that can be hacked, customized, refurbished, & relocated

I remember my reaction when I saw the first iteration of Aalo back in 2018. It was simple, sophisticated, and honestly made me wonder why nobody ever thought of making furniture that literally ticks every box. The Aalo’s system was clever, and using just a handful of parts, you could quite literally build whatever you want. The same parts could make one table, or could be pulled apart and re-joined to make two benches, or even a shoe-rack.

From a business stand-point, Aalo was a complete win. Build a handful of parts and imagine the designs using those parts. The possibilities were literally endless. From a user stand-point, the Aalo allows you to make what you need. Need a standing desk? Check. Need a clothes-rack with a stool on the side? You could just use the same pieces to put together anything you needed. Plus, Aalo was designed to be pulled apart too, which made relocating a breeze. Traveling to a city for 6 months? You can shift all your furniture in a flat-packed box and piece it together with ease at your destination. This unique approach to modular, shape-shifting, easy-to-relocate furniture also made the Aalo incredibly sustainable and eco-friendly. People wouldn’t need to discard old furniture to buy new ones. And if something ever broke, you just needed to replace the broken part, not the entire piece of furniture. Aalo wasn’t designed with a landfill or a product-grave in mind. It figured a way to reject planned obsolescence.

Designed by a former Lexus Engineer who found himself shifting cities a lot, Aalo developed and evolved over time to become Aalo 2.0, the same product in essence, but designed to be stronger, made from finer materials, and work anywhere, including outdoors. Going a step further to make the range more durable, and therefor last for possibly a decade longer, Aalo 2.0 fine tunes a few things while sticking to its original philosophy. The products come flat-packed, much like IKEA’s furniture would, but unlike the Swedish home-decor giant, Aalo 2.0 is also designed for ‘disassembly’. This ensures that when you travel between cities, shifting jobs, your entire lifestyle travels WITH you. Aalo 2.0 comes apart as conveniently as it’s put together… with connecting panels and joineries that tighten with a single tool, the Aalo 2.0 can be assembled, disassembled, or even repurposed into newer items of furniture. Its Lego-like simplicity gives you the opportunity to be creative with your furniture, building exactly what you want, and its sheer genius is that designer Sejun Park devised a clever Nordic-style minimalist design language that shines through no matter what piece of furniture you make. Whether you use Aalo 2.0 to make a footstool, wardrobe, planter-stand, table, or even modular shelf, every product looks like a part of Aalo’s visual family.

The 2nd edition of Aalo goes a few steps further to ensure the best possible UX. Aalo’s online builder allows you to create your own furniture designs and get a catalog of the parts you need. You can even use it to experiment using parts you already have, allowing you to let your imagination go absolutely wild. Just like its predecessor, Aalo 2.0 aims at being a sustainable alternative to regular furniture. Designed to be as much as 99% recyclable, the parts are made from the highest quality zinc and aluminum (making them 40% stronger), and are coated with a premium-feel VOC-free powder coat that maximizes Aalo’s use, allowing it to be used outdoors in the sun or the rain. The powder coat also has a minimal impact on the environment, reducing its footprint while contributing to the product’s ability to be almost completely recycled… an eventuality that seems pretty unlikely considering how Aalo 2.0’s also designed to hack and overcome planned obsolescence, and to even be perhaps the only range of furniture that you can easily travel along with!

Designer: Sejun Park

Click Here to Buy Now: $50 $80 ($30 off). Hurry, limited stock!

Reconfigure, Reuse & Recycle. Aalo 2.0 is a Lego-like furniture with beautiful design that moves and changes with you for life.

Buy Once, Reuse Forever

Create 100+ designs from just 15 parts. With their Lego-like assembly, you can easily add or remove parts to fit your changing space needs, so Aalo 2.0 can move and evolve with you.

Simple Assembly & Disassembly

Aalo 2.0 uses only one type of hardware and tool, and can be assembled in just minutes. Put it together, take it apart and change it up over and over with ease!

Durable & Stainable

Aluminum and Zinc construction with premium powder coating finish for maximum durability, while being 99% recyclable.

Simply add or remove parts to give your furniture a new form and function.

Reconfigure & Reuse

Combining years of experience in manufacturing engineering and product design, we developed an entirely new type of furniture system with a unique interchangeable parts design. It’s a modular furniture like you’ve never seen before.

Connectors and beams are assembled to build a frame.

Simple Assembly

No matter the shape or size, Aalo assembles with just one tool (standard hex key) in just a few minutes. We thoughtfully crafted every aspect of Aalo to be as simple and easy to work with as possible.

For table/bench tops, snap fit (new feature!) panels together, and finish by fastening it to the beams.

Durable & Sustainable

For Aalo 2.0, they upgraded their previously Aluminum connectors with Zinc material, to achieve 40% more load bearing strength and x6 times better impact strength.

The rest of the beams and panel components are made with the same Aerospace-grade Aluminum we’ve been using from the beginning, with only about 1% of our total parts being made out of plastic materials.

3-in-1 Side Table can support more than 470 lbs

All of their metal parts are finished with premium textured powder coating. Aside from being one of the highest grade finishes available for furniture (in both scratch-resistance and durability), powder coating produces ZERO Volatile Organic Compounds during production unlike other common painting processes. This means no harmful chemicals are released to the environment during the finishing process.

They use stainless steel fasteners to complement our Aluminum & Zinc body, so that you can take Aalo outside for even greater versatility.

Click Here to Buy Now: $50 $80 ($30 off). Hurry, Limited Early Bird Stock.