Cork

IdeaPaint

Chalkboard wall paint has been around for a while now, but dealing with chalk dust gets old fast - the solution, of course, is to upgrade that paint just as schools have updated their own writable teaching surfaces.


Young 20-something entrepreneur John Goscha dropped out of his banking job to design and market this material "for home, work or school" that may transform walls as we know now them. It is called IdeaPaint. It is available for half the price of an actual whiteboard and works just as well or better, leaving no marks behind when you wash down your work (and, without the rest of the infrastructure, it turns out to be greener, too). Here's a video showing you how to install IdealPaint.

Here are some of the interiors where the paint were used. It is an awesome idea especially if you have kids at home who just LOVE to mess with your wall.

Dance Floor Power!

Club Surya opened its doors in London in 2008 making it Britain’s first eco friendly nightclub. The club itself is built of recycled materials, but the dance floor is the best piece.  Using piezoelectricity technology, a way of converting the kinetic energy of the dance into electricity, it produces enough electricity to power sixty percent of the entire club.

The brainchild of 39-year-old property developer Andrew Charalambous, aka Dr. Earth, Surya has its own wind turbine and solar energy system, with the plan to donate any surplus electricity to local residents.

When clubbers need a rest from strutting their stuff on the dance floor they can relieve themselves at the latest air flush, waterless urinals and low flush toilets as well as taking the opportunity to freshen up with the club's automatic taps.

If Princes Harry and William and their aristocratic friends, who are frequently spotted at hot London nightclubs such as Boujis or Mahiki, want to attend Surya they will have to sign a pledge to work towards curbing climate change like all patrons attending the club in north London.

"Unless we stop preaching to people and use an inclusive philosophy we're never going to create the revolution to combat climate change," Charalambous told Reuters, explaining why he has invested one million pounds in the club.

"It's also about creating avenues of thought. Imagine what you could achieve if big corporations adopted this kind of initiative."

The technology used in this flooring can be used in just about anything. There’s even plans to fit it into clothing so people can generate electricity by moving which will be able to power mobile electrical devices.

Wall

Wovin Wall from 3form is a modular wall system that consists of small panels mounted on a lightweight metal grid. The removable panels are clipped in alternating directions to create the distinctive three-dimensional woven pattern

Wovin Wall is designed for modularity and longevity. The modular design ensures individual tiles or brackets can be replaced if necessary - components of the system can be rearranged, expanded upon or relocated to adapt to changing needs.

Wovin Wall is designed for disassembly. The whole system can be disassembled without a specialist or specialist tools. The components of Wovin Wall are reusable or recyclable.

This is how it works.

Heat-Activated Paint for Color-Changing Interior Designs

 What if you could change the look of your home without having to do a thing? This heat-reactive paint has a number of amazing applications (more pictured below), but one of the most impressive is the color-changing wallpaper shown step-by-step here.

 As the temperature rises within a room the flowers on the branches slowly bloom, breathing additional life and color into a given space. As night falls and cooler temperatures prevail, the colorful flower print slowly fades back to a mellow green.


 Not limited to just wallpaper, of course, this same strategy by Shi Yuan can be applied to posters or other decorative objects – and can encourage people to touch and otherwise interact with normally stationary and passive designs.


Likewise, as a reminder of each passing day, the cooling of night can erase the current date on your wall-mounted calander and show the passing of time into the next.

Hot or Cool? Color-changing Chameleon Tiles

 There is virtually no limit to what you can decorate with color-changing tiles (fromInventables). Daytime cityscapes turn into urban night scenes as the temperature in a room shifts. Notable applications include showers, floors and others surfaces likely to be exposed to temperature variations over time.


While some of these are simply colored and relatively inexpensive there are all kinds of untapped design potentials yet to be explored. Perhaps they would make a good interior design match for an exterior application of some light transmitting concrete.

Luminoso Light Emitting Wood Panels

Luminoso is a wood composite panel composed of high-grade fiber optics embedded between thin wood layers and then firmly glued together. The Luminoso light transmitting panels have been produced by Litwork GmbH since 2008. All of the common wood types can be utilized such as black cherry, oak, teak, Wenge, etc. The panel sizes are: 12” x 20”, 11” x 20” and 39” x 118”.

This is the company promotional footage:

Check this out as to how the panel looks with a galloping horse behind it.

MossTiles

MOSStiles bring the outdoors in- without the mess!  The MOSStile is made of an ecologic resin base imbedded with natural moss for use indoors. No toxic substances are used in the making of the tile and no chemicals or fertilizers are needed to maintain them once they are installed. Maintenance is practically non-existent and no watering (except for an occasional misting) is necessary. The moss pulls all the nourishment it needs from an environment of at least 50% humidity. MOSStiles should not be placed in direct sunlight as diffuse light or even no light is best for them. And no fertilizer is required. These modular living tiles come in 12 different shades.

Just imagine the beautiful indoor vertical gardens you can create with these tiles: 

And why is there always a downside to new ideas? Because having a real plant indoor without the hassle of watering is really way too good to be true. It turns out that these are not made from moss at all, but lichens - specifically reindeer moss (Cladonia rangiferina):

This slow-growing lichen is harvested in Scandinavia, "stabilized" in a salt solution, glued onto tiles with a resin, then dyed one of twelve different colors. Hence, it is not a plant anymore. It might as well be made out of plastic. All the misting does is keeping them from drying out and crumbling to pieces. Even worse, reindeer moss is a major food source for caribou and other large ruminants. It's so slow growing that it's a threatened (and protected) species in some parts of the world.

Geckskin

We all know gecko's fingers stick to our walls. Since about 2000, scientists have cracked the secret of how geckos are able to perform extraordinary climbing antics. The researchers confirmed that tiny intermolecular forces - so called van der Waals forces - were produced by literally billions of tiny hair-like structures, or spatulae, on each gecko toe.

These forces, which arise when unbalanced electrical charges around molecules attract one another, allow the animal to scurry up walls and even hang upside down on polished glass.
Now, the researchers have managed to create an artificial version of the spatulae. A team from the University of Massachusetts to invent Geckskin, an extremely powerful reusable adhesive that leaves behind no sticky residue. The device is 16 inches square and can support up to 700 pounds on a smooth surface such as glass or a wall.

In the following video, the team would explain how it works and its amazing adhesive abilities. 

Well, thank you little gecko for inspiring the new technology! 

Coconut Wood Composites

Traditionally, valuable tropical woods has been used to make furniture and floorings. The Coconut tree is known to have many uses, from its roots to tips (leaves), from culinary to non-culinary consumer products, industrial products and medicinal products. To many around the world, the coconut tree is considered the “Tree of Life”. Palm trees used to be cut down at the end of their coconut-bearing years and replaced with new coconut palms. Only in recent years did people started researching on the use of the palm tree after it matures.

Coconut Wood Composites quality is comparable with the tropical woods specifically in terms of durability, sturdiness, and versatility. Its hardness and effectiveness are even at par with other hardwood timber that are more popular in the market like mahogany or oak. It has minimal shrinkage, bowing, or bending properties. Dutch manufacturer Kokoshout derived the name Cocodots due to the natural patterns that the wood has.

Self-Healing Paint

Fixing scratches on cars and furniture may be cheap and easy to do yourself in the not-too-distant future. Together with partners in the USA and Switzerland, Case Western Reserve University have developed a polymer-based material that can heal itself when placed under ultraviolet light for less than a minute.

Nissan has applied this technology and produced iPhone cases as the world's first "self-healing" iPhone case. Stuart Rowan, Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University will explain how it works in this video: