Tag Archives: Mikolaj Nicer

Birdhouses hide in these ingenious home address signs to encourage avian-urban biodiversity!

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Our Common House is a household design concept that’s part-address sign and part-birdhouse, designed to increase avian-urban biodiversity.

When we’re not thinking about whether or not they’re real, watching birds always seems to bring us back to nature. Whether we live in a big city or in a rural small town, waking up to the sounds of hummingbirds or looking on as a sparrow builds its nest reminds us that we share our homes with all kinds of birds. Sometimes the concrete and traffic of busy cities make us forget, but products like birdhouses and feeders always bring us back. Designer Mikołaj Nicer conceptualized Our Common House for this reason. Part address sign and part birdhouse, Our Common House is a household design that aims to encourage avian-urban biodiversity.

From a distance, Our Common House is your typical household address display. Made from natural fired clay, the outer casing of Our Common House is unassuming and minimalist. Unadorned by design, Our Common House sports an adaptable design that could fit onto any modern home’s exterior. Whenever the address digits look like they could use some cleaning, residents can remove the outer casing to clean it up before attaching it back on. Just beneath the natural fired clay exterior casing is a nesting box constructed from natural wood. Available in either oak, pine, or poplar, the nesting box provides a safe space for birds to breed, eat, and take care of their young safe from the threat of predators. When conceptualizing Our Common House, Nicer hoped to combine the functionality of address signs with a sustainable cause.

Describing this, Nicer notes, “The lack of nesting opportunities is one of the most important factors limiting the success of urban bird populations. Modern building technologies and concepts of city space organization leave little room for…nesting…Our Common House offers a simple and scalable solution to this problem. It turns the common element of building aesthetics into a functional nesting unit, thus providing the population of urban birds with an invaluable resource.”

Designer: Mikołaj Nicer

The post Birdhouses hide in these ingenious home address signs to encourage avian-urban biodiversity! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This magnetic mood lamp’s portable design comes with a 360-degree charging stand!

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And at the beginning of 2021, we all said, “Let there be light!” Enter the Tune, a minimal portable lamp designed for indoor and outdoor use. Tune is not meant to be the main source of light in a space and falls into the ambient light category with its soft illumination. It is called Tune because it lets you ‘tune’ the lamp the mood of the hour. You can tune it to create an atmosphere for dinner in the garden or for cozy movie night – you decide the mood lighting, the lamp will be attuned to it.

It is a smart lamp for future homes complete with a 360-degree charging stand and wireless charging capabilities. You can get the most out of this product design by having a set of two or three lamps to achieve optimal flexibility and space illumination. The modular stands and lampshades let you play around with the light set up. Each arm of the stand has wireless charging transmitters and profiled positioning dents with magnets to hold it in place – this makes the lamp an overall seamless product design.

Tune is designed to stand horizontally, vertically, or on the side depending on your needs. It features a knob that allows you to adjust the intensity as well as the color temperature of the light. “The critical aspects of the functioning of a portable lamp, intended for outdoor use, are durability and tightness. Therefore, great importance has been attached to the design of the external housing, which protects the internal electrical components against weather conditions, and above all, water,” explains Mikołaj Nicer.

Designer: Mikołaj Nicer

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This coffee table’s sliding indoor garden is the ultimate millennial-friendly plant parenting hack

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Home gardening is difficult enough as it is, but it gets even trickier when you live in small city quarters. With city living’s and home gardening’s popularity rising in recent years, those of us who live in apartment complexes might feel discouraged from starting home garden projects – they’re messy and time-consuming, not to mention that a lot of space is usually a prerequisite. That’s why SOLE was created. SOLE, a home gardening system, poses first as a small coffee table only to reveal a hidden, self-maintained, miniature garden for city dwellers who want to fill their homes up with some natural greens, but not the fuss that typically comes with them.

More people are moving into cities, which means that access to home gardening is decreasing since natural light is harder to come by and smaller apartment spaces, like efficiency studios, are preferred. Thankfully, SOLE’s coffee table was designed to take up as little space as possible in order to fit into even the smallest of studios. Indoor urban gardening is usually practiced by using grow box containers that require a lot of window ledge space and natural sunlight – both of which can be hard to come by in city apartment searches. In order to make home gardening possible in any city-living space, SOLE maintains the perfect climate, temperature, and nutrients for you and your chosen plants so long as they fit inside the coffee table’s extensive body. While researching the influence of temperature, exposure time, intensity, color from visible light, along with the distance and angle of light distribution, the designers behind SOLE decided to incorporate a lighting system that would enhance plant growth by imitating the effect the sun’s rays have on indoor plants.

The garden is maintained primarily by RGB diodes that emit light similar to that of sunlight so that the enclosed botanical environment mimics the outdoors, providing the optimal space for homegrown and nutrient-rich herbs or plants. Additionally, the grow box inside of the SOLE coffee table maintains irrigation through fully-integrated water tanks and fertilizing mechanisms. The grow box comes equipped with three separate pots that can be easily removed for cleaning and whose RGB diodes adjust according to each plant’s needs. Lastly, the whole system can be modified and maintained by using an app through your smartphone, tablet, or PC or the control panel located underneath the coffee table’s sliding cover.

Designers: Mikołaj Nicer, Jakub Maciejczyk, Grzegorz Szczupał

Concreative!

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In case you didn’t get the memo, concrete is making it big in the design circuit… and it’s being highlighted in the most unusual places. Take for example the Masonic Watch by Aggregate, with its one of a kind concrete body. The Enso does the same thing too. The turntable itself is a rather retro/hipster product and using concrete only makes it more kitschy and cool. With its imperfections, concrete gives a different flavor to a product that has otherwise only seen the use of plastic, glass, metal, and wood. Concrete brings to the product a much needed sense of diversity and a breath of fresh air.

Designed with a simple rounded form that highlights the vinyl disc and arm, the Enso comes with a rather integrated form and the only thing breaking it is the walnut wood control panel which juts out to end the monotony and play with one’s visual expectation of continuity. Keeping in sync with the theme of concrete, the wooden panel has two concrete knobs too. What I probably like the most is that the designers try to make it very obvious that concrete doesn’t mean grungy and old-fashioned. The presence of a light strip running around the side of the Enso gives it a futuristic touch, making the turntable look unique and modern both. Plus with vinyl turntables being a massive part of the underground warehouse music culture, concrete may just be the most perfect material selection for its design, I’d say!

Designers: Mikołaj Nicer, Grzegorz Szczupał and Jakub Maciejczyk

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This Could Be the End of Personal Vehicles

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Altern isn’t quite a bus, but it’s not quite a train! Instead, this transportation hybrid takes the best qualities of both to maximize the existing urban architecture within cities. Specifically, the system runs on roadways as buses would with intermittent stops at designated locations. However, the autonomous, electric system consists of multiple passenger units (similar to a train) than can automatically join together to make more room for passengers.

Depending on the time of day, traffic, and demand, the smart-linked system can adapt to accommodate demand for faster, more efficient rides! It’s likely that something like this could altogether replace personal vehicles within cities.

Designers: Mikolaj Nicer, Blazej Bacalski, Jakub Maciejczyk & Grzegorz Szczupal

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