Printed signs get reprinted every week, while full LCD signage burns power all day just to show a static promo. E-ink has quietly solved this in e-readers by holding text without sipping battery, but it has not shown up in everyday public spaces where signs still get taped to shelves. Samsung’s new 13-inch Color E-Paper is a panel that tries to live in that middle ground, digital enough to update remotely, quiet enough to blend in.
Samsung’s 13-inch Color E-Paper is roughly the size of an A4 sheet, 1,600 x 1,200 pixels in a 4:3 aspect ratio, built to sit on shelves, counters, tables, and doors where paper signs still dominate. It uses digital ink and an embedded rechargeable battery to hold static images at zero watts, sipping power only when content changes.
A grocery aisle, cosmetics shelf, or bookstore with weekly specials could run these panels instead of printed posters. Staff update prices and layouts from their phones using the Samsung E-Paper app, or centrally through Samsung’s VXT cloud platform, without ladders, tape, or stacks of paper. The signs look like printed cards but can flip to a new campaign in seconds.
The housing is the first commercial display enclosure to use bio-resin derived from phytoplankton, independently verified by UL to contain 45% recycled plastic and 10% phytoplankton-based resin. Samsung says this can cut carbon emissions in manufacturing by more than 40% compared to conventional petroleum-based plastics, and the packaging is made entirely from paper.
The panel maintains static content at zero watts and uses far less energy than conventional digital signage when it refreshes. An advanced color imaging algorithm smooths gradations and refines contours so posters, book covers, and product shots look closer to print than to a backlit screen. A 13-inch, 4:3 color e-ink panel with this power profile sounds suspiciously like the hardware you would want in a large-format e-reader or note-taking tablet.
Samsung is clear that this is a business display, part of a lineup that already includes 32-inch and upcoming 20-inch models aimed at replacing printed signage. Still, it is hard not to imagine what would happen if a future device borrowed this panel, pairing it with touch and pen input for textbooks, comics, sheet music, or ambient dashboards that can sit on a desk for days without a charge.
Some of the most interesting future-facing ideas show up first in places like retail signage. A 13-inch color e-paper display built with phytoplankton-based resin is, on paper, just a smarter sign for cafes and cosmetics counters. It is also a reminder that the ingredients for calmer, more sustainable reading and information devices already exist; they are just waiting for someone to assemble them into something you would want to curl up with on the sofa.
There’s something refreshing about a company that doesn’t just slap their logo on a tote bag and call it customer appreciation. SWNA Office’s Earth’s Hatch kit for Lotte E&C proves that welcome gifts can be more than forgettable tchotchkes collecting dust in a drawer. This is design that actually thinks about the person receiving it, and what they might genuinely need in their daily life.
The kit arrives in a birdhouse-shaped package made from pulp paper, the kind that feels substantial in your hands. Strip away the paper band, and inside you’ll find five egg-shaped magnetic objects nestled in protective pulp packaging. The whole experience feels deliberate, like opening something that was designed to be opened, not just shipped.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Those five eggs aren’t just decorative items you’ll stash away and forget. Each one serves a specific purpose at the threshold of your home, that chaotic zone where packages pile up and keys mysteriously vanish. One egg contains a ceramic-blade box cutter for safely slicing through Amazon deliveries. Others function as magnetic hooks and holders, perfect for hanging access cards, food waste sorting tags, car keys, or that shoehorn you’re always hunting for when you’re already late.
The egg shape itself is surprisingly smart from a user experience perspective. It’s soft and rounded, fitting comfortably in your palm. The scale feels just right, not so small that it’s fiddly, but not so large that it dominates your door. There’s a gentle familiarity to holding an egg, even one made from recycled plastic. It’s a form we all understand instinctively.
The birdhouse package transforms into a refillable tissue holder after you’ve unpacked everything. The circular opening on the side isn’t just aesthetic; it’s functional, letting you see at a glance when you’re running low. Made from vegan leather, it brings a soft contrast to the stone-like texture of the eggs. The eagle motif threading through both the eggs and the “nest” creates visual continuity that feels intentional rather than gimmicky.
What makes this project worth paying attention to is how it handles sustainability without being preachy. Sure, the eggs are made from recycled plastic and the case uses vegan leather, but the kit doesn’t stop at material choices. It’s designed to make eco-friendly living more manageable. That box cutter with the ceramic blade helps you break down boxes properly for recycling. The sorting tools encourage proper waste management. The kit isn’t just made sustainably; it helps you live more sustainably.
This is where corporate gifting usually fails. Most welcome packages are essentially branded advertising that recipients tolerate. Earth’s Hatch flips that script by centering utility. The magnetic feature is particularly clever because it solves a real problem. How many times have you frantically searched for your keys or access card? Now they have a dedicated spot right by your door, held by these smooth, tactile objects that are actually pleasant to interact with daily.
The name itself, Earth’s Hatch, captures what Lotte E&C seems to be going for with their “safe planet project.” It’s about emergence, about something new coming into being. The eagle egg symbolism reinforces that idea of potential and care. Eagles are protective of their eggs, just as we should be protective of the planet. It’s a bit poetic for a construction company, but that’s precisely what makes it memorable.
SWNA Office managed to create something that works on multiple levels. At first glance, it’s a beautiful object with its muted, speckled surface that photographs gorgeously in that minimalist product photography style we’ve all become accustomed to. But it doesn’t rely solely on aesthetics. The design holds up in actual use, which is rarer than it should be.
What this project really demonstrates is that thoughtful design can elevate even something as mundane as organizational tools and tissue holders. By connecting form, function, and meaning, Earth’s Hatch becomes more than a welcome kit. It’s a physical manifestation of a company’s values, something recipients will actually use and remember. That’s the kind of design that deserves attention.
The typical park pavilion or bus-stop canopy offers shade but little else. A roof on posts that sits in the sun all day, casting shadows, is treated as background infrastructure that is purely functional and visually forgettable. Michael Jantzen’s Solar Electric Pavilion is a response to that missed opportunity, turning a simple shelter into a piece of functional land art that also makes power for the community around it.
Jantzen has spent years exploring sustainable architectural experiments where structures are expressive about how they work. The Solar Electric Pavilion is conceived as a public gathering place and shade structure that generates and stores electricity from the sun for the local community, celebrating the relationship between form and renewable energy instead of hiding the technology behind walls or burying it on rooftops where no one sees it.
Approaching the pavilion on a hot day, you are drawn under its open steel shell to escape the sun. Underneath, a circular field of cylindrical seats and tables invites people to sit, talk, or work, with a large ceiling fan overhead moving air. The space behaves like a familiar pavilion, a place to meet or rest, but everything around you is quietly tuned to capture and use sunlight.
Sixty photovoltaic panels are mounted along the curved and straight steel box beams, converting sunlight into electricity. Most of that power is sent into the local grid, while some is stored in batteries hidden inside the cylindrical seats. That stored energy runs the pavilion’s lighting at night, powers the ceiling fan, and lets visitors charge phones or laptops, turning sitting down into a direct connection with the solar infrastructure.
A raised circular platform accessed by a spiral stair lets people step up into the middle of the structure and look out over the landscape. From there, the pattern of beams and panels reads as a solar sculpture, framing sky and horizon. The pavilion is no longer just a roof but a small observatory of its own energy system and surroundings.
The pavilion sits within Jantzen’s body of work, which often uses modular steel, bold geometries, and renewable technologies to propose new public infrastructure. He treats solar panels, batteries, and structural steel as equal parts of the composition, designing for both performance and public engagement. The pavilion is conceived from the start as a cohesive amalgamation of shade, power, and sculpture that does not hide what it does.
The Solar Electric Pavilion suggests a different future for everyday public structures. Instead of passive shelters, they become small power stations that feed the grid, cool the air, and charge devices. Jantzen’s pavilion shows that sustainable architecture does not have to hide in technical rooms. It can stand in the open, invite people in, and make the work of clean energy part of the shared experience of a place.
There’s something deeply satisfying about furniture that refuses to stay in one place. Not in the sense that it walks around your living room, but in how it adapts, shifts, and changes with you. Taishi Sugiura’s Hayashi Cabinet does exactly that, blurring the line between functional storage and something far more poetic.
The word “Hayashi” translates to “forest” in Japanese, and once you see this piece, the name makes perfect sense. Instead of traditional cabinet doors or panels, Sugiura uses actual Japanese cypress branches arranged across the front of the frame. These aren’t decorative touches glued on for aesthetic appeal. They’re the real deal, thinned branches that would typically be left discarded in the mountains after forest management. Sugiura saw potential where others saw waste.
What makes the Hayashi Cabinet genuinely clever is its movability. Each branch can slide left or right along the cabinet frame, letting you customize the openness or privacy of your storage space. Want to show off that vintage record collection? Slide the branches apart. Need to hide some clutter? Push them together. It’s like having adjustable blinds, except way cooler and made of wood.
This design philosophy stems from traditional Japanese spatial concepts. Think about shoji screens and sliding doors in Japanese homes, elements that define space without rigidly locking it down. Sugiura brings that same flexibility to furniture, creating something that responds to your changing needs rather than forcing you to work around it. Some days you want minimalist display, other days you need concealment. The Hayashi Cabinet doesn’t judge either choice.
The materials tell their own story. Japanese cypress branches have these gorgeous tight grains and natural curves that you’d never find in standard lumber. They’re inherently asymmetrical, which means no two cabinets will ever look identical. As light filters through the gaps between branches throughout the day, the shadows shift and dance, transforming the piece from static furniture into something almost kinetic. It’s the kind of detail that makes you notice your own furniture, which sounds strange until you realize how rarely that actually happens.
Sugiura studied at Nagoya University of Arts, and his material-first approach runs through all his work. Before designing the Hayashi Cabinet, he created the Kintoun Kits, playful modular construction sets that won a JID NEXTAGE silver prize. That same curiosity about how people interact with objects translates beautifully into this domestic context. It’s not just about looking good on an Instagram feed. It’s about living with something that genuinely adapts to you. We’re already flooded with mass-produced, one-size-fits-all storage solutions but here’s a piece that celebrates imperfection and individuality. The branches aren’t perfectly straight. They don’t align in rigid rows. They breathe.
There’s also an environmental angle worth noting. Using thinned cypress branches addresses a real problem in Japanese forestry, where these materials typically get abandoned as too difficult or low-value to process. By turning them into design features rather than treating them as scraps, Sugiura gives them new life and purpose. It’s sustainable design that doesn’t announce itself with green marketing buzzwords but simply makes smart material choices.
The beauty of the Hayashi Cabinet lies in its restraint. It could easily tip into gimmicky territory with all those moving parts, but Sugiura keeps the overall design clean and understated. The frame stays simple, letting the natural cypress branches become the focal point. And because you’re the one deciding how open or closed the front becomes, you’re essentially co-designing the piece every time you adjust it. The Hayashi Cabinet doesn’t need batteries or WiFi. It just needs you to slide some branches around. Simple, tactile, human. That’s the kind of interaction design that endures long after the tech trends fade.
What do Swiss timepieces and sailing rigging systems have in common with orthopedic braces? More than you might think. The engineers at Osteoid drew inspiration from these precision mechanical systems to create Bracesys, a revolutionary approach to fracture immobilization that challenges everything we thought we knew about medical casts.
Traditional plaster casts have remained largely unchanged for over a century. Off-the-shelf braces offer convenience but rarely fit properly. Custom 3D-printed alternatives require expensive scanners, lengthy production times, and specialized expertise. Bracesys sidesteps all these limitations with an adjustable framework of segmented units, articulating connectors, and tension dials. The entire system weighs just 150 grams and folds flat into an envelope, yet provides rigid support comparable to traditional casts. More remarkably, clinicians can customize it to each patient’s anatomy in real time, adjusting the fit as swelling decreases and healing progresses.
Designer: Osteoid Design Team
Kevlar cables run through the framework and get tightened via integrated dials, borrowing directly from sailing rigging where distributed tension points create precise control. Yacht rigging achieves massive structural loads through this exact principle. Osteoid just applied it to wrist immobilization. The framework comes from SLS and MJF 3D printing with medical-grade Nylon 12, reinforced at stress points with CNC-machined aluminum and stainless steel. This hybrid manufacturing approach delivers geometric complexity for anatomical conformity while keeping structural integrity where loads concentrate. Pure injection molding couldn’t achieve these organic shapes. Pure 3D printing couldn’t handle the forces.
Over 600 anonymized CT scans went into the sizing methodology, processed through AI-driven segmentation and implicit skinning algorithms that map soft tissue deformation around bone structures. Principal Component Analysis crunched all that data into four standardized sizes covering the 5th to 95th percentile of hand and wrist anatomy. You’re getting semi-custom fit from off-the-shelf components, which anyone in medical device design will tell you is brutally difficult to pull off. Manufacturing needs standardization for scale. Patients need personalization for outcomes. Most companies pick one and live with the compromise.
A typical Colles fracture brace measures 190 x 90 x 115 mm assembled but breaks down completely flat into an A4 envelope. Clinicians wrap it around the limb loose, let the segmented units find their natural anatomical alignment, then use screwdriver-sized tools to adjust connector lengths and tighten the tension dials incrementally. Spring-loaded quick-release pins handle adjustments as swelling changes during recovery. The whole initial fitting takes minutes. I keep coming back to that speed because custom 3D-printed orthotics need weeks of turnaround, and drugstore braces fit approximately nobody correctly. This lands right in the middle with none of the usual tradeoffs.
Every plaster cast is single-use. Every prefab brace eventually becomes landfill. Traditional orthopedic devices generate waste at a scale that should embarrass the industry but somehow doesn’t. Bracesys uses recyclable materials throughout, sterilizes for reuse in clinical settings, and lets you replace individual components rather than trashing the whole assembly. I’m usually cynical about sustainability claims in medical devices because they often conflict with clinical needs or regulatory requirements. This actually works because better economics and better outcomes align with lower waste. Nobody has to sacrifice anything.
We shouldn’t still be using plaster casts in 2026. The technology to do better has existed for decades. The problem has always been the gap between custom fabrication costs and mass production constraints. Most attempts at solving this try to make manufacturing cheaper or faster. Bracesys flips that entirely by making adjustability the core feature and shipping that capability to the point of care. You’re not customizing during manufacturing. You’re customizing during application. That philosophical shift matters more than any individual mechanical innovation. If orthopedic practices actually start using this widely, we might finally kill off a medical technology that’s been coasting on pure inertia since the 1800s. It’s time we ‘brace’ for change…
Yanko Design’s podcast, Design Mindset, continues to bring compelling conversations with design leaders who are shaping the future of the industry. Powered by KeyShot, the show premieres weekly, offering listeners deep dives into the minds of innovators, strategists, and visionaries. Episode 15 tackles one of the most critical shifts happening in design today: how sustainability has moved from a nice-to-have checkbox to a core measure of design excellence itself.
This week’s guest is Lisa Gralnek, a brand builder with 25 years of experience who currently serves as U.S. Managing Director and Global Head of Sustainability and Impact for iF Design, a respected member of the international design community since 1953 and host of the prestigious iF Design Award. Lisa’s journey spans work with giants like Adidas and the Boston Consulting Group, giving her a unique vantage point on how sustainability has evolved from corporate afterthought to design imperative. In this conversation, she reveals how one of the world’s most prestigious design competitions is fundamentally redefining what “good design” means.
Embedding Sustainability into iF Design’s Evaluation Framework
When asked about the decision to make sustainability one-fifth of the iF Design evaluation framework, Lisa shared her pride in the initiative. iF Design has been operating since 1954 and now spans nine disciplines across 93 categories, from product and packaging to branding communications, UX, UI, service systems, architecture, and interior architecture. The shift was deliberate and structural: iF Design moved from a general “impact” criterion to explicitly isolating environmental and social sustainability as 20% of the score. Commercial impact was repositioned into differentiation, one of their five criteria, allowing them to “really single out the environmental and social ramifications of a design.” This alignment reflects the iF Design Foundation’s core mission to advance design for a better world.
The design thinking process involved convening a Sustainability Working Group of eight experts from around the world who bring deep, often sector-specific sustainability expertise. “We work together to figure out what is the process, what is the questions, what are the certifications and accreditations we’re acknowledging, as well, most importantly, I would say, of supporting the jurors as they go through this process as well,” Lisa explained. The group co-developed processes, discipline-specific optional questions, recognized certifications and accreditations, and on-site juror support aimed at consistency, rigor, and education for both entrants and jurors. This collaborative approach ensures that sustainability evaluation remains both credible and practical across vastly different design categories.
Distinguishing Authentic Impact from Greenwashing
One of the biggest challenges facing any sustainability evaluation is distinguishing genuine innovation from performative claims. Lisa explained how the first year revealed significant gaps: jurors felt skeptical not about sustainability itself but about making accurate judgments with insufficient information. At that first jury, sustainability experts were on the ground for only the second year, and the feedback was clear. Entrants weren’t providing enough detail in the character-limited impact field for jurors to make informed decisions, whether they were discussing environmental impact, social impact, or business impact.
The solution was to embed three optional questions into every discipline, sometimes tailored at the category level, along with a selectable list of objective global, regional, and industry-led certifications. These questions remain optional because iF’s mandate focuses on rewarding good design rather than punishing inadequate submissions. Lisa gave a concrete example of how this helps identify hollow claims: when a television or computer monitor entry discusses sustainable packaging in the sustainability field, it raises red flags because the entry itself is about the product, not the packaging. In packaging specifically, iF piloted requesting a bill of materials (BOM) or digital product passport (DPP) to quickly validate claims about recycled content, compostability, low-impact inks, and water-saving processes. Interestingly, packaging entries dipped this year, raising the question of whether increased scrutiny discouraged greenwashing or simply affected submission rates.
“Fewer, Better” as a Design and Consumption Ethos
Lisa’s philosophy around sustainable design cuts to the heart of overconsumption. She candidly admitted that if she were being a radical sustainabilityist, “none of us needs anything. None of us needs anything anymore.” She recalled an interview on The Economist after the 2008 financial collapse where experts insisted people needed to buy, that society needed to incentivize consumption. But consuming our way out of financial collapse, she argues, represents the capitalistic model and business operating system of the world without necessarily serving the planet or people. Her first jury experience brought this reality into sharp focus: walking into the warehouse where 50% of the 10,000 to 12,000 annual entries are physically displayed, she burst into tears. The sheer volume of stuff human beings create, all in service of capitalism’s engine, became overwhelming when viewed through a sustainability lens.
So what does “fewer, better” actually mean in practice? Lisa explained it operates on two levels: individual conscious consumption choices and organizational design decisions. At the designer and company level, it means thinking through the circular R ladder: what can we refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle, refurbish, or resale? “Fewer, better is like, I think it’s less extractive and more regenerative,” she explained. This approach shifts the entire paradigm from novelty-driven production cycles to necessity-driven design that prioritizes extending product lifecycles and reducing resource pressure. Even digital alternatives and AI, which some propose as solutions, carry their own massive environmental footprints, making the “fewer, better” ethos essential regardless of the medium.
The Shift from “Nice-to-Have” to Imperative
Lisa has been passionate about sustainability since early in her career, leaving fashion after nine years because she’d lost appreciation for the craft amid the luxury sector’s excesses. She attended graduate school intending to return and work on sustainability in luxury, but graduated into the 2008 financial collapse when sustainability wasn’t even a conversation starter. Her time at Boston Consulting Group revealed the depth of corporate resistance: she vividly remembers asking a snack food company CEO about greening their packaging supply chain at a luncheon and being laughed at by both the CEO and a senior partner. Whether the dismissal stemmed from her being a young woman among older men or the sheer absurdity they perceived in the question, she witnessed this pattern repeatedly across retail, travel and tourism, consumer packaged goods, and fashion. The consistent message: sustainability is awesome, so long as it doesn’t cost margin or sales.
Yet Lisa sees a significant shift happening now, driven primarily by consumers. Awareness of climate change, planetary degradation, and social unfairness has grown dramatically, particularly as social media makes information more accessible regardless of which news sources people consume. Most people globally now recognize there’s a problem and understand that action is needed. There’s also a compelling business case, as demonstrated by Walmart’s LED transition 15 to 18 years ago. Despite enormous upfront costs to change every light bulb in every warehouse and retail store, the head of sustainability reported a payback period of just three and a half weeks in energy savings. “So often you just need to make the change and people are so scared and teams are so siloed and you know people are afraid like you can’t be afraid and the business case is almost oh almost always there to do better,” Lisa observed.
Technology’s Double-Edged Sword: E-Waste and Hope
When asked about sustainable design trends she wished would disappear, Lisa pointed to a concerning paradox: our increasing dependence on technology. E-waste is burying us, with most electronic waste filled with rare earths that are extremely difficult to mine and controlled by very few players. This issue increasingly surfaces in geopolitical conversations and international trade negotiations yet remains underrepresented in sustainability discourse. Lisa referenced a presentation at South by Southwest where visuals showed the number of dump trucks filled with e-waste every hour that the world creates and deposits into landfills. These landfills poison water sources and ground soil, creating massive downstream pollution and health impacts. Everything exciting and technological, while representing the direction the world is heading, simultaneously presents this enormous environmental problem.
Yet within this challenge lies genuine hope. Lisa expressed excitement about the increase in repairability, recyclability, upgradability, and upcyclability in electronics, whether discussing car batteries, e-bike batteries, mobile phones, speakers, or computer interfaces. The momentum isn’t moving fast enough and integration remains incomplete, but the trajectory points toward keeping electronics in use longer and reducing waste. This trend represents designers and companies genuinely rethinking product lifecycles and moving away from planned obsolescence. Lisa’s realistic optimism captures the mindset she sees among sustainability leaders across disciplines: they’re very realistic about where we are and where we’ve been, but they’re willing to fight for transformation in the future. They recognize that future transformation only becomes possible when action starts today, with imperfect solutions, uncomfortable conversations, and puzzle pieces that contribute to a larger systemic change.
Design Mindset, Powered by KeyShot, premieres every week with new conversations exploring the minds shaping the future of design. Listen to the full episode with Lisa Gralnek to hear more insights on sustainability and how it plays a pivotal role in shaping iF Design’s outlook.
If you live in a place where drinking water and groundwater is not a major problem, then you’re one of the lucky ones. There are a lot of places in the world where that is a major concern, and it definitely affects their living conditions. One such place is Punjab, India, where they’re currently experiencing one of the world’s most severe groundwater depletion crises due to intensive farming.
Enter a groundbreaking microhome designed by New York-based architects Aleksa Milojevic and Matthew W Wilde. Living on Groundwater is not just a tiny house but a prefabricated home standing on only 25 square meters that helps to actively repair the environmental conditions that support it, making the residents active agents in groundwater recharge.
This innovative microhome has an integrated system that is able to harvest rainwater, uses greywater recycling systems, and also has an on-site injection well that is able to return treated water back to the aquifer. This is a unique hydro-positive housing model that has a low carbon footprint and is able to give back to the environment more than it takes. It is also able to reframe microhomes as not just cute places to live in but as environmental infrastructure designed to repair ecological conditions. Think of it as a home that doesn’t just exist on the land. It actively heals it.
Design-wise, it has an elegant rural aesthetic that fits right in with the Punjab agricultural landscape. It sits lightly above the fields on a raised timber frame so that it minimizes disturbance to the ground and at the same time allows water flow, air movement, and vegetation to pass freely underneath. This thoughtful elevation means the earth beneath can continue to breathe and function naturally, rather than being compressed and sealed off like traditional foundations would do.
The home features a permeable facade that lets natural light and the surrounding views become part of the house’s ambiance. It responds to seasonal variations while maintaining a visual connection to the surrounding landscape. Imagine being able to adjust your home’s relationship with the outdoors depending on the weather and time of year. During hot summers, it provides shade and ventilation, while in cooler months, it can capture warmth and light.
The sleeping area is designed in a loft style so that the ground level is freed up to be the living and working area, maximizing every inch of the compact 269-square-foot space. Inside, you get modular cabinetry and convertible work surfaces, ensuring that the furniture adapts to your needs instead of dictating how you should live. The walls and roof assemblies are prefabricated, so the design can be replicated across different rural contexts without losing its functionality or environmental benefits.
The brilliance of this design didn’t go unnoticed. Living on Groundwater won first prize in the Kingspan-funded MICROHOME #10 competition organized by Buildner, earning €20,000 and recognition from an international jury. The judges highlighted the project’s “technically sophisticated integration of building systems, local ecology, and water resilience,” praising how it positions the microhome not merely as a low-impact dwelling but as an active agent in environmental repair.
What makes this project particularly compelling is that it was developed through shared research on Indian agricultural history undertaken during a Yale University seminar and field study in Punjab. The designers didn’t just parachute in with a generic solution. They studied the land, understood its challenges, and created something that truly responds to the specific needs of the region.
In a world facing intensifying housing pressures driven by climate instability, rising construction costs, and growing demographic needs, Living on Groundwater offers a hopeful vision. It proves that small-scale architecture can be both beautiful and purposeful, compact without feeling cramped, modern without being cold, and sustainable without sacrificing livability. It’s the kind of thoughtful design that reminds us that the best solutions often come from truly understanding a problem and designing with nature, not against it.
So here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: someone made a USB drive out of mushrooms. Well, technically mycelium, the sprawling fungal network that lives underground and occasionally pops up as the mushrooms we eat. But still. We’re talking about storing your family photos, tax documents, and embarrassing early-2000s selfies inside what is essentially cultivated fungus. And somehow, this makes perfect sense.
Enter the Soft Drive, which looks less like a tech product and more like something grown in a lab that studies alien artifacts. Designer Sree Krishna Pillarisetti built this portable drive with a shell made from mycelium, the root-like structure of fungi, combined with hemp and bioplastics from waste materials. You can see the fungal fibers through the translucent case, all wispy and organic, protecting the electronics inside. It’s strange and beautiful and deliberately so. The whole thing is designed to make you feel the weight of your data again, to make storage physical and local and weird in a way that makes you reconsider why we ever outsourced our digital memories to faceless corporations in the first place.
The translucent casing shows off the wispy, organic texture of mycelium mixed with hemp, wrapped around a standard memory card and heat sink. There’s a woven lanyard attached like it’s a charm you’d wear. It holds 8GB, which sounds quaint until you realize that’s exactly the point. This isn’t about competing with cloud storage. It’s about asking why we ever thought it was a good idea to hand over our entire digital lives to massive, energy-guzzling server farms we’ll never see or control.
The name is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I’m here for it. “Soft Drive” as the inverse of “hard drive” is chef’s kiss levels of nomenclature. Pillarisetti, who completed this as his MFA thesis at Parsons, built the entire shell from materials sourced from waste streams: mycelium, hemp fibers, and polylactic acid (PLA). The mycelium acts as natural shock absorption, which is clever because dropping your drive has historically been a nightmare scenario. Fungi don’t crack the way plastic does. They compress, absorb impact, and generally behave like they evolved for this, which, in a roundabout way, they kind of did.
And I personally love how deliberately weird this thing looks. Consumer electronics have spent decades trying to disappear, to become these frictionless black mirrors we barely notice. The Soft Drive does the opposite. It foregrounds its materials, makes you aware you’re holding something that grew, that came from a living process. The translucent case means you see everything: the fibrous mycelium texture, the metallic components inside, the fact that this object has layers and history. It’s the anti-iPhone, and I mean that as a compliment. Pillarisetti calls it a “regenerative memory storage device,” which is a fancy way of saying it can eventually break down and return to the earth instead of sitting in a landfill for the next thousand years. The whole concept pushes toward decentralized local networks, physical sharing, data you can hand someone instead of emailing a Dropbox link. It’s romantic in a way tech hasn’t been in years.
Some plastics never get recycled, no matter how much you sort them. Fishing nets, buoys, agricultural films, and multilayer snack packaging are too dirty or too mixed for normal recycling systems, so they end up burned or buried. Meanwhile, we keep pouring concrete into retaining walls and bases, even though concrete production is heavy on CO₂ and performs poorly under tension when soil shifts or water builds up behind a wall.
Eco-C CUBE treats those two problems as one solution. Developed by WES-Tec Global and the Korea Low Impact Development Association, it turns hard-to-recycle mixed plastic waste into a structural block for civil infrastructure. The New-Cycling process melts fishing nets, buoys, and film waste at low temperature without sorting or washing, then extrudes the material directly into three-dimensional interlocking blocks designed to hold back hillsides, stabilize slopes, and form solar panel bases.
Picture a discarded fishing net or multilayer wrapper that normally has no second life. Instead of being shredded, washed, and downgraded into pellets, it goes straight into a controlled low-temperature extruder that preserves the polymer structure. What comes out is a dense, high-strength block with better tensile and compressive performance than concrete, which is what you want in a retaining wall trying to hold back a hillside after heavy rain or freeze-thaw cycles.
The three-dimensional interlocking design lets crews stack the blocks into buttress-style or box-style retaining walls without cement or adhesives. Gravity and geometry keep everything stable, which means faster installation, easier disassembly if something needs repair, and built-in drainage through hollow channels so water does not accumulate pressure behind the wall. That drainage feature also makes the blocks compatible with low-impact development strategies that manage stormwater on site.
Each kilogram of Eco-C CUBE reduces about 2.99 g of CO₂ compared to business as usual, verified by Life Cycle Assessment through the SDX Foundation. That reduction comes from avoiding incineration, skipping energy-intensive washing and sorting, and replacing concrete. Because the blocks use waste collected through extended producer responsibility systems, they plug directly into existing collection networks instead of requiring new infrastructure to gather and transport material.
A coastal town shoring up eroding slopes could use these blocks instead of pouring concrete, cutting carbon while handling weight and drainage. Solar farms needing stable panel bases that do not leach heavy metals can be built with Eco-C CUBE instead of traditional footings. To most people, these installations will just look like dark modular blocks, but underneath, they are turning plastic that would otherwise drift in oceans or burn in incinerators into long-term structural work.
Eco-C CUBE does not chase perfect purity or pretend mixed plastics can return to virgin resin. It accepts the messiness and turns it into something structurally useful. For designers and engineers, that shift from trying to eliminate waste to actually building with it might be the more interesting part, treating the worst materials we generate as a feedstock instead of an endpoint.
Modern homes depend on electricity for everything, from fridges and routers to medical devices and central A/C. Storms, rolling blackouts, and grid hiccups trigger a familiar scramble for flashlights and ice bags. Food spoils, devices die, and working from home becomes impossible. Most backup options either feel like camping gear with a couple of outlets or like a renovation project with permits and opaque pricing.
Anker SOLIX E10 is a smart hybrid whole-home backup system that blends batteries, green solar power, and a smart generator into one coordinated setup. It is designed to keep an entire house running, not just a few circuits, and is rated for whole-home backup with a 200-amp connection when paired with its Power Dock, matching a typical US main panel.
Designer: Anker
On a normal day, the SOLIX E10 quietly charges from solar and the grid, storing energy in modular 6 kWh battery packs that can scale to around 90 kWh with multiple stacks. When the power drops, the system steps in, deciding when to draw from batteries, when to add fuel through a DC link to its tri-fuel smart generator, and when to resume solar charging once the storm clears.
SOLIX E10 Power Module Inverter
Anker SOLIX B6000 Battery Module
With the Power Dock or Smart Inlet Box, the SOLIX E10 can back up every circuit in a typical house, so you are not choosing between the fridge and the router. It is engineered to start and run a full-size 5-ton central A/C by handling the high inrush current that usually trips smaller systems, which matters when a summer outage hits during a heatwave.
Anker SOLIX Power Dock
Anker SOLIX Smart Inlet
When the grid fails, the lights stay on without flickering, the Wi-Fi does not reboot, and the A/C keeps humming. The system switches over in under 20 milliseconds, fast enough that most electronics never even notice. The feeling is less about the exact speed and more about the house simply not going dark anymore, even when the neighborhood does and trees are still down.
The SOLIX E10 can watch the weather and charge itself ahead of a predicted storm through its Storm Guard feature, so you are not caught with half-full batteries when the first tree hits a line. The modular packs give enough headroom for multi-day outages, while the forecasting takes backup power from a reactive scramble to a quiet ritual where the system prepares itself before you think to check.
Anker SOLIX Smart Generator 5500
The optional smart generator stretches backup power through long outages without running nonstop. Instead of charging through AC conversion, it feeds the batteries directly over DC, which Anker claims is up to five times more fuel-efficient than a traditional setup. It runs when needed, rests at night, and feels more like part of a system than a last-resort accessory.
The SOLIX E10 is not only for rare blackouts. On normal days, it can store cheap off-peak energy or excess solar and run the house when rates spike, trimming bills. Each unit accepts up to about 9 kW of solar input, so a rooftop array keeps the batteries topped up, and the system prioritizes important circuits to keep essentials alive longer during outages.
The hardware is a family of clean, stackable modules, with batteries that can be wall-mounted or floor-standing as the setup grows. The core units use an all-metal NEMA 4 enclosure and are certified to UL 9540 and UL 9540A, signaling they are built to live outdoors, handle bad weather, and meet the toughest residential safety standards.
Power anxiety is real, the feeling that one bad storm could wipe out food, work, and comfort for days. An outage where the house stays lit, the air stays cool, and the fridge keeps humming while the street outside goes dark is the payoff Anker SOLIX E10 is built around, making blackouts feel like minor blips instead of household emergencies.
