Cookie Cup

As I was sipping tea this morning, I found this on the internet: Cookie cups - using cookie as a material for tableware. Sip the coffee then eat the cup! Saves a lot of washing up! Love the idea.

This cookie cup was the creation of a Venezuelan designer named Enrique Luis Sardi which was made for Lavazza, the famous Italian coffee company. It’s so ingenius – he made it using a cookie for the outside and a special patented sugar icing on the inside. Dual purpose – it creates an insulator for the cookie and add sweetness to the coffee! 

What's more, they sell a version that is lined with chocolate, ain't that hot? This is the kinda coffee that should be served in a proper material library. :) Here's a photograph of the designer himself, even he's hot:

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: 

Soft Gel Magnets and more inventables

All of a sudden magnets are no longer hard. And how about a material that temporarily protects surfaces up to 7500F? How can we apply this new material into our daily life? In Inventables they know a lot about this issue...

Sorry, I don't understand

So, how do we relate the ecotones and the materials? We will be dealing with a research approach to materials in order be able to start defining ourselves those ecotones. There are many communities of materials, such as woods, glasses, fabrics, ceramics... but we will be working on the interaction between them, trying to enrich existing materials through different techniques.

This interface, the blog, will be a Sample Room, and so it should be used as a tool to know more about a material or as a experimenting laboratory, also it will work as a directory of manufacturers, or a place to look for the instructions of maintenance of a material. Therefore it is very important to work like researchers and keep everything in order by using tags and labels, and always sign the post with the author's name.