A Plant Companion That Moves With The Sun Fitting Perfectly Into The Korean Culture

In a world where the sun plays a significant role in shaping preferences for living spaces, a unique product has emerged to bridge the gap between lifestyle and the desire for a sun-soaked environment. The innovative SPOT, a pet plant inspired by the beloved Toy Story, brings a touch of whimsy and practicality to the lives of those who are away from home during the day.

Designer: Dami Seo

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Koreans have a cultural inclination towards south-facing directions for their homes, favoring abundant sunlight throughout the day. However, modern lifestyles often lead people away from home during peak daylight hours, creating a paradox between their preference for sunlit spaces and their absence during the sunniest times.

Drawing inspiration from Toy Story, SPOT takes on a personality of its own when the owner is away. Just like Woody and his adventures, SPOT enjoys the warm sunlight in the south-facing direction, making the most of the daylight hours that the owner might miss.

The creators of SPOT have ingeniously crafted its form based on Woody’s rhythmic hat line, adding an extra layer of charm and nostalgia for fans of the iconic movie series. This attention to detail enhances the emotional connection users may feel with their sun-loving companion.

SPOT’s design mimics a sunflower’s ability to move towards the sun. Equipped with sensors, SPOT can adjust its position to capture the optimal amount of sunlight, ensuring that users can enjoy the warmth without the need to move the plant manually. This dynamic feature aligns with the varying sunlight patterns throughout the day.

For users returning home, SPOT adds an element of surprise and delight. By detecting the SPOT’s location, users can playfully interact with their sun-loving companion, creating a unique and entertaining experience. The wheels at the bottom of the product enable SPOT to move towards the sunlight source, making it a dynamic and engaging addition to any home.

SPOT’s ability to move is not only entertaining but also practical. Equipped with sensors on both sides, SPOT can navigate around objects in the house, ensuring a seamless and safe journey towards the sunlight. The autonomy of movement enhances user convenience, aligning with the modern desire for smart and responsive home devices.

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To keep SPOT energized and ready for its sun-seeking adventures, a user-friendly charging unit is provided. SPOT can effortlessly navigate to the charging station, making the recharging process a hassle-free experience. Additionally, SPOT’s easy-to-clean and disassemble design ensures that maintenance is a breeze.

SPOT not only adds a touch of magic inspired by Toy Story to your home but also addresses the practical challenge of aligning sunlight preferences with a dynamic lifestyle. With its adaptability, autonomy, and entertaining features, SPOT is more than just a pet plant; it’s a delightful companion that brings joy and sunshine into the lives of its users.

The post A Plant Companion That Moves With The Sun Fitting Perfectly Into The Korean Culture first appeared on Yanko Design.

This tiny vegetable cultivator is an indoor garden for one, bring fresh food to your table!

Now more than ever, I think we’re all itching to get outdoors to spend time in nature. Enjoying the natural pleasures of life, like gardening and cooking, has become a top priority for many of us. However, being stuck inside due to quarantine restrictions can make that difficult. I know I hardly have room on my window ledge for a hummingbird feeder, let alone a vegetable garden and I’m not the only one. Designers like Eun-Jeong Pi attempt to bridge the small spaces in which many of us live with our strong desires to still remain close to nature and live sustainably – Farmin, a smart vegetable cultivator designed by Pi, offers one such bridge.

Farmin is comprised of four main parts: the body, cover, seedling bags, and an LED lid. The body is definitely the hub of the vegetable cultivator, storing the soil, seedling bags, and water inlet. Along the left side of the body, an LED indicator signals to users when the soil in Farmin could use some water, which can then be distributed using the water inlet until filled completely. Then, on the right side, the body features an air filter that helps maintain the cultivator’s productivity and regulate the air that the plants breathe.

Dotted over the body’s surface, seedling bags provide good drainage and aeration for each cultivation period. Farmin’s transparent, yet foggy cover alludes to the morning fog in nature that nestles above evergreens in dense forests, working to remind users that their miniature vegetable garden can bring them closer to nature. Of course, the cover also works to contain the vegetable garden’s mature plants so that they don’t wilt or make a mess of your kitchenette. I know mine is already messy enough without any spilled soil. An LED lid also works to mimic sun rays for each vegetable to absorb and use as nutrients.

Nowadays, many of us have painted our thumbs green (even if the paint was toxic), and designs like Eun-Jeong Pi’s smart vegetable cultivator, Farmin provides the means to test them out and give smart home gardening a try. Millennials seemed to have been following this trajectory towards sustainable living for a while now and this time spent in quarantine has only solidified our dreams of cultivating our own small garden one day. Alexa, play ‘Garden Song’ by Phoebe Bridgers.

Designer: Eun-Jeong Pi

With the popularity of home gardening steadily increasing over the years, Eun-Jeong Pi created their own solution for small-scale gardening fit for your kitchen counter.

Through different ideations, Farmin ultimately assumed a soft and simple structure, allowing for intuitive operability and attractive display.

With an easy-to-use hinge door, Farmin hopes to help make home vegetable cultivation that much more accessible and the fruits of your labor that much more immediate.

An LED display offers different modes of operation, depending on the natural light that your vegetable garden might already be receiving. Turn on ‘Night Mode,’ when the sun goes down so that your home cultivator’s available light is maintained.

A slim water inlet allows users to nourish their garden with water, while an LED indicator signals when your soil might need some replenishment.

Farmin’s accompanying app provides users with the means to adjust the conditions inside Farmin so that their plants remain well-fed, while also offering fun tips for recipes and plant care.

These tables with built-in gardens is the perfect gardening hack every home needs!

Living in smaller spaces often requires a lot of rearranging. I probably switch up my studio’s design on a monthly basis all in order to fit the ideal furniture to make the most out of the little space I have. Despite my efforts, I usually end up having to choose one item between three different pieces of furniture simply because my studio won’t fit more than that. This often makes it difficult to merge functionality with style. Of course, I’d much rather go for the loveseat over the desk, but where would I do my work? BloomingTables, dubbed “the world’s first living furniture line,” creates household tables that double as indoor gardens to cater to that exact dilemma.

It seems nowadays that people are trying to get closer and closer to nature, even in their own homes. Biophilic design is on the rise once more, and many of us who live in smaller spaces want to embrace nature indoors too. BloomingTables is a new biophilic desk design that embeds living plantlife into each table, just beneath the transparent, glass surface. BloomingTables comes in four variations: desk, coffee, entryway, and side tables. Each table is equipped with an acrylic tub that keeps the plant life, soil, and water in an airtight, designated space so that we won’t ever have to worry about leakage. The acrylic tubs are filled with layers of gravel and activated charcoal to absorb water and also to avoid the chance of overwatering the plant life. Once the soil layers are filled, we can then create our own arrangement of succulents, ferns, herbs, or even pebble art, ideal for those who like to cook, but don’t have enough room for both a desk and herb garden. The transparent glass surface adheres to suction cups and can be lifted to water the plant life below.

Each pinewood table comes in varying sizes, but come equipped with the same features, including a waterproof tub for soil and a twist-to-open drain valve on the off-chance your plant life is overwatered. BloomingTables, depending on the size ordered, can support up to 400lbs, which means this table design has successfully merged functionality with style. Everything from the painted steel hairpin legs and sheet of 6mm tempered glass, to the endless array of possible biophilic designs, echoes BloomingTables’ commitment to bringing the beauty of nature indoors.

Designer: BloomingTables

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This hexagonal indoor planter system helps you choose plants that will flourish in your home’s natural lighting

If you like gardening but live in a city apartment, finding out which plants thrive best changes everything. It could mean finding that exact time during the day when a sliver of sunlight hits your floor, giving your bamboo palms the energy needed to make it to another day. Or, it might mean finding the sweet spot in your kitchen or bathroom where you can water your ivy and let it properly drain. Whatever the case might be, Gromeo is a miniature living wall system, designed by Habitat Horticulture to bring us the ideal plant for our unique living spaces. Whether you live in an apartment with ample sunlight or in an apartment without windows, Gromeo delivers plants that are known to thrive in your specific living space.

I’ve got a fever for plants. It’s safe to say, especially with quarantine, we’ve all caught some of it at this point. But taking care of plants can get expensive and time-consuming. My ivy died by the time I learned how to take care of it. Gromeo was primarily created by the thinkers at Habitat Horticulture in order to make the benefits of home gardening accessible to anyone without the constant work that comes with maintaining the plant’s health. Similar to other home gardening systems, Gromeo integrates a base reservoir filled with one gallon of water and uses Growtex’s water-efficient wicking technology for plants to absorb water through capillary action, keeping them hydrated for up to three weeks. Without any plumbing or electrical work needed, Gromeo allows users to pick a wall system based on their living space’s particular light availability. Through a palette-devised key, users can choose between garden wall systems that need anywhere between minimal to constant sunlight. The low-light wall systems typically include lots of leafy greens like fern and palm leaves and the high-light wall systems offer pods filled with cactus and grass. Constructed entirely from maple wood, recycled and sustainable material, Gromeo caters to the environmentalist in each of us. The hanging wall system waters the plants on a daily basis, all that’s required of its user is refilling the reservoir located in the product’s base every two weeks.

Gromeo comes fully planted with the plants ideal for your living space and outfitted with mounting hardware and drywall anchors for easy application. A lot of self-sustaining home gardens today lose their appeal through wasteful construction and loud tech gimmicks, which result in little knowledge gained for users who are actually concerned with taking care of their plants. Gromeo seems to offer a compromise. From the chic and sustainably-sourced materials that make up the structure to the thoughtful approach taken in regard to the customization of each wall system according to a plant’s needs, Gromeo brings the fruits of gardening to even those of us who might not have known we had it in us to take care of a plant, let alone a whole garden.

Designer: Habitat Horticulture

 

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

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

The Ocean Cleanup Project’s collected plastic gets and grows a new life with this urban planter

Since 2013, the Ocean Cleanup initiative has encouraged designers to envision products that could be made using plastic waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Designed to meet the guidelines set out by this initiative, designer Troy Dunn created this urban garden planter to achieve two environmental missions: recycling plastic materials and fostering green environments in urban settings!

The Ocean Cleanup initiative called for products that were durable, easy to use, able to retain their value (after all, what is the point of rescuing plastic from the ocean only to have it dumped into the garbage again), related to social activities, and finally, be a product that people actually wanted and would keep for their whole lives. To fit these requirements, the urban planter was made to be weatherproof, ergonomic, and stackable. Floor space is limited in urban areas, so it was important to design a product that wouldn’t take up too much room — as the owner may end up throwing it away to make room for their other possessions. The reason this planter works is because there is an emotional attachment between humans and anything they create/produce. Plants, though don’t speak, still react to our love and care, and watching them grow and bloom is a highly fulfilling endeavor. Any plant parent will tell you once you start growing plants, its impossible to back out!

The Ocean Cleanup garden planter is made up with three different parts- a synthetic cork base, to protect against wear and tear, a water reservoir made of clear plastic, which allows users to see the water levels inside and prevent overwatering, and a “soil vessel,” which holds the plant. The water reservoir sets this product apart from other gardening products. Most planters are designed with the assumption that the water that drains out the bottom will simply be absorbed by the ground underneath it. City dwellers rarely have a backyard where they can set their pots on the actual dirt, which means that water will simply leak onto a brick patio or some other man-made surface. The water reservoir is just one of the many thoughtful alterations that make this product perfect for urban life while reducing chances of overwatering the plants.

Designer: Troy Dunn