Tag Archives: paper

Sustainable office chair uses paper-like material made from wood by-products

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Sustainable furniture and designs are thankfully becoming more common, but the “sustainable” label can actually be applied to different things. They can be made from recycled materials like metal or PCR plastics, or they can be made from new but biodegradable materials like wood, cork, and paper. While both kinds are good, they don’t always address the accumulating material waste that comes from the production of these objects, even the bits and pieces of wood that get left on the cutting room floor and then thrown out. Giving a new purpose to these by-products is another sustainable practice, one that is being applied to a beautifully minimalist office chair that’s made from dozens of sheets of paper.

Designer: Arper

Of course, it’s not literally made from paper, which would be too soft for a chair no matter how many sheets you stack, especially for a sleek and slender seat based on Arper’s iconic Catifa 53. Instead, it uses PaperShell from a Swedish startup of the same name, a material that almost poetically transforms paper, which comes from wood, back to a wood-like material that offers rigidity, stability, and, more importantly, beauty. In a nutshell, it uses both wood by-products like sawdust and chips as well as waste wood like fallen branches in forests to create a new paper-like material that can be used in place of wood, plastic, or fiber composites.

That’s the case with the Catifa Carta, which compresses dozens of these sheets into a composite that’s then bent and formed into an elegant chair with a gentle slope sitting on top of thin yet sturdy metal legs. Unlike its older sibling, this more sustainable version of the chair leaves the seat in its original, unpainted glory. That means you can see the natural imperfections of the PaperShell material, giving each chair a unique character. It’s pretty much the same as the highly prized grains in wood that give designs their natural charm.

What’s even more special about the chair is that even the end of its life has a story to tell. PaperShell can be recycled to produce new and different products, but it can also be turned into biochar to nourish the Earth. The material itself sequesters carbon dioxide which can be used to enrich soil. It’s a truly circular life cycle that starts and ends with the Earth. Appropriately, Arper has made the Catifa Carta easy to disassemble to make this process even easier.

Of course, the chair isn’t just a thing of beauty inside and out, it’s also a functional piece of furniture. Though some might have concerns about the ergonomics of using such a chair for long periods at work, it’s still a well-designed seat that makes you feel good not only about sitting on it but also about the exciting journey that this wood-like material has made since its birth from a seed.

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Sidekick Notepad is a simple writing tool for the digital/analog hybrid workers

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Over the years I have learned to embrace a digital + analog hybrid workflow process. While most of my work goes straight to the computer, tablet, or mobile phone that I’m working on at the moment, I still like having a pen and paper with me at all times to jot down things I’m thinking about or things I need to do. There’s something therapeutic about writing it down rather than just typing it out so products that can give me that convenience are always welcome.

Designer: Cortex

The Sidekick Notepad is basically a writing pad where you can jot things down while having a meeting or while doing your normal, every day tasks. It is designed to fit either above or under your keyboard and is meant to be your “sidekick” if you’re like me that sometimes likes to put her to-do list on paper rather than on pixels. There’s a section to put the date, a huge section for notes, and then on the side, there’s a to-do list section with checkboxes so it’s easier to tick things off.

It’s not meant to be like a journal where you keep it even after the tasks or notes have served their purpose. It’s a tear-away kind of pad where you can just tear it off and then throw it (or compile it somewhere else if that’s your thing). You can also scan your notes for posterity and then save it on your preferred notes app. It doesn’t seem to have a dedicated app that can automatically scan and store things for you so you have to do it the manual way.

The Sidekick Notepad has 60 pages of Munken Lynx paper so if you run out, you’ll have to buy a new notepad since it’s not refillable. The cover is made from something called “Extract”, a paper made from recycled coffee cups. This adds another layer of things that I love so this product seems to be created especially for people like me who still can’t let go of the analog stuff.

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This ChatGPT-powered smart notebook can understand and summarize handwritten notes

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The pen is mightier than the sword, especially given how it has withstood the test of time, even in our current digital age. But while writing things down by hand has plenty of cited benefits, from psychological to practical, handwritten notes also miss out on a lot of conveniences and potential, especially when it comes time to search through dozens of pages of scribbles. For years, smart notebooks have tried to bridge this gap between analog and digital with some measure of success, but the majority of them stop at turning handwritten notes into digital text you can easily search. This innovative smart notebook, however, upgrades that experience by harnessing the power of AI to make the best out of your scribbles and sketches, turning them into summaries, tasks, appointments, and even translations that will take your productivity to the next level.

Designer: XNote

Click Here to Buy Now: $179 $249 ($70 off). Hurry, only 7/210 left! Raised over $230,000.

AI has been a hot topic for the past years, impressing many while scaring off others. The power that artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks can bring to seemingly ordinary products can really be mind-blowing, especially when you consider the new experiences they enable. ChatGPT, for example, is quite a famous large language model (LLM) application that is being used for things like conversations, searches, and other text-related processing that makes it feel like you’re talking with an actual human person. The XNote smart notebook utilizes this amazing AI to bring together the joy of writing on paper and the convenience of digital technology in an intuitive and seamless way.

The magic of the XNote starts, of course, with pen and paper, specifically a beautiful invisibly coded notebook and a revolutionary smart pen. The notebook itself bears a Moleskine-like design, complete with an elastic band to keep it from opening accidentally. The smart pen looks like it’s simply leaving ink marks on paper, but it’s also detecting invisible patterns so that every stroke is accurately sent and mirrored to the XNote app via Bluetooth in real-time. You don’t have to take pictures of your notes and you don’t even have to wait for your scribbles to sync with the app. You can see your scribbles and drawings recreated inside the app instantly, almost like magic. With a built-in 265mAh rechargeable battery, you can write for 7 to 8 hours of use without having to worry about a forced break.

While other smart notebooks stop there, XNote transforms your ink marks into text, formulas, or diagrams, all kinds of digital objects that can later be searched or even shared with others online. XNote, however, goes beyond handwriting recognition and uses ChatGPT to create contextual recognition, smartly identifying the kind of text so that you can simply ask XNote when you need to look for a note. Can’t remember where you stored a friend’s suggestion for your next binge reading? Just ask in the XNote app to look for the book recommendation you wrote last week. Need a quick recap of the meeting notes you took earlier? Ask XNote to summarize those for you in easy-to-digest pieces. You can even have those notes translated for easier communication beyond geographical boundaries. And since the notes are digitized, you can easily search across different notebooks and access your data on platforms, ensuring that your analog notes remain accessible long after the paper notebooks go away.

XNote not only cares about your notes but also about your privacy as well. It uses advanced end-to-end encryption, two-factor authentication, and top-tier cloud security protocols to ensure no unauthorized person ever lays eyes on your notes. And while the basic package has the core features you need, XNote offers a $9/month ($59/year launch special) Premium subscription that brings all the power of AI to your fingertips, including Smart Task Alerts and AI-driven Tags and Categories. Even better, now that it has reached its $200,000 funding milestone, every backer who has selected either the 1-Year Subscription or the Combo Bundle will be automatically upgraded to a Free Lifetime AI Membership! With the ChatGPT-powered XNote smart notebook, you can employ that powerful AI to do the heavy lifting of making sense of your notes while you continue to enjoy the benefits of writing with pen and paper.

Click Here to Buy Now: $179 $249 ($70 off). Hurry, only 7/210 left! Raised over $230,000.

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These recyclable, paper RFID tags look like a work of magic

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Passive RFID tags, like the ones attached to products in stores for easy checkout, are generally manufactured using a mixture of metal and circuitry to form the tag’s primary parts: a microchip and an equally microscopic antenna. These bits work together to store and communicate information to a nearby RFID reader, and they’re decently cheap to mass-produce, only costing around $0.10 in materials per tag (according to the IAITAM in 2021).

Still, the gross cost of mining and producing large quantities of metal and circuitry components adds up over time, and due to the nature of those materials, regular passive RFID tags have nowhere to go — well, other than the trash bin — once they’re pulled off of the products they’re designed to protect.

According to PulpaTronics, the developer of a revolutionary all-upcycled paper RFID tag design, over 12 billion RFID tags are manufactured per year, often for single-use purposes, after which they end up in landfills. Founded by a group of four students at the Imperial College London’s Dyson School of Design Engineering, the PulpaTronics team is already making waves (and winning multiple awards in sustainable design) for their ingenious paper RFID tag design, which eliminates metal from the manufacturing process entirely.

Designer: Chloe So, Barna Soma Biro, Rui Ma, Jingyan Chen (via PulpaTronics)

PulpaTronics’ all-paper RFID tags store information geometrically, using a laser to imprint a “conductive layer of carbon material” directly onto paper materials upcycled from the recycling bin and from the trash. According to the James Dyson Award organization, the team also experimented with other materials, like wood and cork, before ultimately landing on paper. The result: an RFID tag design that is twice as cheap to mass-produce as other RFID tags, while contributing 70% less CO2 emissions.

What’s interesting about this design is how the team was able to create each part of the RFID tag, including antennae, without any metal whatsoever — once again, it’s all just paper with a little bit of carbon sketched on top — and the geometric shape of the carbon layer is what gives the RFID tag design its conductivity and its ability to transmit information to a nearby reader.

If PulpaTronics’ new tag design goes into mass-production, that could apparently save “20,000,000 kilograms of CO2 annually” per 100,000 items using the design. In any case, this is a sizable win for sustainable engineering — further proving that it’s possible to replace metal and other scarce and non-degradable materials with easily-sourced alternatives.

The post These recyclable, paper RFID tags look like a work of magic first appeared on Yanko Design.

Note and Sketch Anytime, Anywhere with this Magnetic-binding Clipboard

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Productivity systems like GTD and the Bullet Journal have made paper notebooks all the rage again. But while it’s inspiring to see so many creative designs for notebooks and stationery, these can also get in the way when you just need to write or sketch something down. Bound notebooks might not have the right combination of grids and lines that you need, or they might have too many or too few pages. Ring binders let you add, remove, and move pages, but the rings tend to get in the way, and the holes lead to tears and unaesthetic pages. You could always make a DIY notebook combining just the sheets and designs that you need, but keeping them together can also be a hassle. If all these sound familiar to you, here’s how this simple yet ingenious clipboard removes the friction when it’s time to take notes while also letting you design your notebook your way.

Designer: Hirock Design

Click Here to Buy Now: $39 $45 (13% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48 hours!

Gather the Paper You Need and Want

Rather than limiting yourself to the type and number of pages a notebook comes with, this clipboard lets you mix and match any kind of paper that fits inside it. An A4 jacket, for example, can hold A4 paper or A3 paper folded in half, while the A5 version can use A5 and A4 sheets in the same way. You can use unmarked blank paper, grid paper, dotted sheets, printed designs, or anything you want or need to give your thoughts a physical form.

You can really use any paper that you can write on, even those with printed text on the back. This is an excellent way to make use of those discarded sheets before they’re dumped into the bin. Even perforated or loose leaf paper with holes is fair game because they can easily be hidden inside the jacket’s “margin.”

Clip Paper Easily in Any Order

Unlike typical binders, this clipboard uses a clever Magnet x Lever mechanism to hold those loose sheets together while still letting you easily remove them as needed. Simply pushing down on the edge lifts up the clip, releasing the paper and allowing you to add or remove sheets in a snap. The clip can hold up to 30 sheets of paper, but it can secure even a single sheet if that’s all that you have left.

This deceptively simple design gives you absolute freedom in how you arrange your notes. You can always put a blank page at the top of the stack, ready to meet the tip of your pen or pencil at a moment’s notice, or you can order them according to topic or a specific flow of thought. Or you can just leave them as-is and none will be the wiser.

Take Notes Anywhere

This ultra-minimalist paper notebook isn’t just easy to organize, it’s also super easy to use. Simply lift the flip tab to open the notebook and you’re good to go. You can even leave your pen inside so that it’s ready the next time inspiration strikes. The same strong magnets that keep the sheets of paper together also keep the cover from accidentally opening and exposing your precious scribbles. The jacket’s rigid hardcover and flexible angle make it trivial to fold it around and hold it in one hand, allowing you to take notes even while standing up.

Best of all, both the inside and outside of the jacket are waterproof and you can easily wipe any drops that fall on it. This gives you the flexibility to not just take notes anywhere but also take your notes everywhere. You can even put it up on a metallic surface or whiteboard thanks to its magnetic clip. Time to ditch those pretty but inflexible notebooks and embrace the freedom that this magnetic, loose paper jacket can bring to your creativity and productivity.

Click Here to Buy Now: $39 $45 (13% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48 hours!

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Origami Expert Folds A Single Piece of Paper To Create These Detailed & Expressive Face Portraits

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João Charrua is a Portugal-based artist whose Instagram bio reads ‘I fold paper’. And it’s true, he does simply fold paper, but he folds it into these sinister yet beautiful faces that seem to hold the weight of secrets worth a hundred years. Charrua holds a deep fascination for masks, and he believes that a mask “intrinsically carries an energy with which we identify in some way”. He believes them to be portals to our imagination, carriers of mysterious and magical energy, and this is the energy he attempted to recreate in his intricately folded and precisely crafted paper portraits!

Designer: João Charrua

Charrua creates expressive and detailed human faces from single sheets of paper, crafting and adorning them with delicate noses, angular jawlines, cavernous eyes, and solid eyebrows. He models these darkly serene human faces through carefully planned and meticulous folds. Charrua deep-dived into the world of origami around thirteen years ago, when he was trying to find a common interest to share with his daughter. “Origami requires rational and sequential thought, where each fold goes to form part of the whole, and they all have to come together to produce the final result,” he said. His newfound love for origami encouraged him to research contemporary practitioners and was thoroughly impressed by the level of detail and patience one could grow to possess, if they truly invested in the art.

Charrua’s process is quite thorough and painstaking as well. He usually makes sketches or three-dimensional drafts, where he visualizes specific features and works on the initial prototype models before beginning to create the final model. He says, “I believe that by repeating the process many times, certain gestures, folds, or techniques become routine acts, so that a natural creative process develops, underlain by the subconscious.” The bulk of the work is done way before the first fragment of the final model comes into existence. Through intense trial and terror, he finally concludes on a face that he believes is worthy of turning into a precisely rendered portrait.

Charrua’s portraits aren’t really smiling ever, in fact, they always have a slight frown or a sense of sadness on their faces, which lends a stronger air of elegance and beauty to their overall persona or could be the secret to their visual appeal. You can check out more of Charrua’s work on his Instagram.

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This minimalist snap binding clipboard lets you effortlessly use your favorite paper everywhere

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We are living in an increasingly digital world, with computers, smartphones, and the Web governing most of our lives. That hasn’t made paper extinct, however, and it has, in fact, rekindled a passion for “old-fashioned” analog ways of giving thoughts more visible form. There is an overabundance of paper products today for that purpose, many of which unsurprisingly try to lock you into a single brand or kind of notebook. Nothing, however, can be simpler than using loose paper, especially the type that you’ve grown fond of. It is, however, too easy to lose loose sheets of paper, which is why this deceptively simple yet talented clipboard also makes it easy to keep those pieces of paper together with a single push.

Designer: Hirock Design Office

Click Here to Buy Now: $44 $49 (10% off at checkout). Hurry, deal ends in 48 hours!

Clipboards have been around for more than a century, and they obviously got their name from the central piece that makes them work. That clip hasn’t changed much over the course of history, and its often bulky form makes the clipboard less than ideal for anything other than sitting on your desk or sticking to a wall. That leaves few other options for carrying sheets of paper around, and folders with binders and clips also add unnecessary bulk to what should really be a thin sheath to hold these pieces of paper.

Just like its namesake that wraps tightly around your body, the Paper Jacket leaves no space except for paper. Even the “clip” that holds the paper in place barely adds any height, and this height is filled up by the cover that also clips into place when closed. Despite that, you never risk your paper falling off or flying away, all thanks to the thin yet powerful bar of magnet that keeps everything together.

Simply pressing down the edge of the board opens the clip effortlessly to release the paper or to add more. Whether it’s just a single sheet or a maximum of 30, the strong neodymium magnets will hold the paper securely. Thirty sheets of paper might sound a bit limiting, especially if you’re in the zone, but it keeps things simple and tidy. Plus, you can easily swap out written sheets for clean ones when you need to.

The strip of magnet does more than just hold the paper down, though. It also keeps the hard cover in place, whether closed or flipped back, making sure it doesn’t get in the way of your writing. It can also hold pens or stack on top of other magnetic clipboards. It’s even strong enough to stick to a whiteboard! It almost makes the paper jacket multifunctional, leaving you with fewer excuses not to bring your favorite sheets of paper along.

Despite its thin and light appearance, the board and the cover are hard enough not only to protect your paper but also to write on them while standing up and holding the board with one hand. You can also flip the board upside-down and have it stand on its cover, quickly turning it into a reading stand. And, of course, it offers nearly limitless freedom on what paper to use, how you want to write on them, and how many to bring along with you. With this sleek and effortless clipboard, you’re just one cover flip away from putting down your thoughts for posterity and productivity.

Click Here to Buy Now: $44 $49 (10% off at checkout). Hurry, deal ends in 48 hours!

The post This minimalist snap binding clipboard lets you effortlessly use your favorite paper everywhere first appeared on Yanko Design.

Rocketbook Pro is a modular notebook you can wipe clean to use over and over again

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Pen and paper never really went out of fashion, even in this day of computers and smartphones. They did, however, experience a resurgence in popularity, thanks to some relatively new paper-centric productivity systems like The Bullet Journal. While there are plenty of advantages to this “analog” experience, there are also some drawbacks in our modern digital age. Fortunately, technology and intelligent design have made it possible to bridge the two worlds in a way that’s simple, unique, and, more importantly, sustainable. That’s the kind of modern experience that the reusable Rocketbook Pro notebook is offering, now with a few more features designed to make a notetaker’s life more convenient and more stylish.

Designer: Rocketbook

Rocketbook isn’t entirely new to this “reusable notebook” market and is, in fact, one of the pioneers. It started with a notebook that you had to microwave in order to use but quickly evolved to using an advanced type of paper that behaved almost like a dry-erase board. Using Pilot’s line of FriXion pens, you could simply wipe any markings off a page with a damp cloth and start anew, preferably after you’ve snapped a photo of that page. It’s a technology that helps save paper and trees while also offering the convenience of searchable notes stored on the cloud.

As its name suggests, the new Rocketbook Pro takes that experience to the next level, building upon the wins of the first Pro model from two years back. Unlike the standard Rocketbook, the Rocketbook Pro has Page Packs designed with different templates, ranging from to-do lists to meeting notes to plain pages. These packs attach to the Rocketbook Pro via magnets, making it trivial to add, remove, and rearrange them as desired. As before, the Rocketbook mobile app allows you to take photos of those pages that can then be uploaded to cloud storage and analyzed with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so that they can be easily searched, even if they contain handwritten notes. Rocketbook Pro makes that process even more convenient with an NFC tag that immediately launches the app the moment you tap your phone on it.

This new version of the Pro notebook also refines the appearance and design of the reusable notebook, making it look more professional and improving its usability. Its hardcover vegan leather cover is more scratch-resistant, and it ditches the awkward pen holder so that it can now lie or fold back completely flat. You can, instead, clip the pen on the spine, which has a small curve at the top to indicate that purpose.

Like many reusable notebooks, the Rocketbook Pro tries to offer the best of both analog and digital worlds, combining the familiarity and benefits of handwriting with the convenience of digital storage, search, and retrieval. It also saves a significant amount of paper, though it’s not exactly clear how sustainable the patented materials and processors really are. For professionals, creatives, and avid notetakers that love the act of writing by hand, the Rocketbook Pro offers the flexibility and freedom of a modern analog experience, now with a lot more convenience and a handsome appearance to boot.

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Biodegradable, Single-Use Circuit Boards Printed on Paper

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Because most computing technology is notoriously earth-unfriendly with its inability to be reused or recycled, researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton have developed circuit boards printed on paper that can be safely disposed of after a single use, either by burning or naturally biodegrading. Me? I love burning things. Just not my hand on the stove like I did this morning making oatmeal.

The paper is first printed with wax to create channels, then heated, so the wax melts, permeating the paper. Next, conductive metal is screen-printed onto the board, followed by the application of conductive and semi-conductive inks and an electrolyte gel to create the board’s resistors, capacitors, transistors, and wiring. The final result? A functional paper circuit board that could be eaten in the event you’re captured by the enemy.

Do you think this is the technology they use in Mission Impossible for those self-destructing messages? I sure hope so because otherwise, those agents were inhaling a lot of harmful chemicals if they didn’t vacate the area within five seconds. Like their missions weren’t already risky enough!

[via YankoDesign]

Niko trash bin tips the balance towards usability and sustainability

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It’s sometimes both frustrating and amazing how simple changes can have massive impacts. That is true not just in philosophy and productivity but also in design, where a small detail can make or break a product. A small blemish can ruin a visual masterpiece, or a single part out of place could become a liability rather than an asset. Conversely, sometimes that small change can dramatically improve the usability of a product, almost changing the narrative completely. A wastebasket, for example, can become more than just a place for trash that we normally avoid, turning into an almost welcoming receptacle for things we will throw away as well as things that might still get another chance in life through recycling.

Designer: Fabio Rutishauser

While we’re all told to throw away our trash properly, trash cans and wastebaskets seem to be designed to discourage that habit. Because of what they hold, they’re often designed to be hidden in shame from view. Most are also designed to make it harder to place things in them, as well as difficult to segregate the different types of waste you’ll be throwing away. For example, why do all trash cans have small openings that face all the way up and away from you?

Niko challenges decades of design convention and presents a waste bin that is supposed to be more usable than ordinary waste baskets. That’s thanks to a single design change, where a “fin” protrudes from the bottom of the container, raising one side a little and making it tip forward just a bit. This puts the opening at an angle where it’s easier to put things in, even from a distance. It doesn’t require you to drop trash into the opening with precision or to walk over just to do that because the opening is facing upward.

The trash bin is also rather unique in its appearance, looking more like those file boxes you store folders and paper in. It’s actually made of two bins of different sizes, with the smaller box being a detachable container with a handle. The idea is that this section can hold sheets of uncrumpled paper that can perhaps be reused later. Of course, there’s no hard rule for that, and you can also use the two boxes to segregate different types of waste material.

Niko is made from powder-coated sheet steel, giving it its own sustainable appeal. A trash bin that encourages segregation and recycling is an ideal office accessory where there is a lot of paper waste that doesn’t get separated often enough. It also brings with it a small change that inclines the container to make it a little bit more usable while also giving it some character so that you won’t have to be embarrassed about showing it off, regardless of the trash inside.

The post Niko trash bin tips the balance towards usability and sustainability first appeared on Yanko Design.