Exhibition: Philips: The Microbial Home

For the 2011 edition of Dutch Design Week, Netherlands-based giant Philips will be showing five lifelike models of concepts for the Microbial Home, a forward looking group of design concepts that represent an innovative and sustainable approach to energy, waste, lighting, food preservation, cleaning, grooming, and human waste management.

The Microbial Home project is part of the Philips Design Probes program, which explores far future lifestyle scenarios based on research in a wide range of areas. The Microbial Home Design Probe consists of a domestic ecosystem that challenges conventional design, it’s a proposal for an integrated cyclical ecosystem where each function’s output is another’s input. In the project the home has been viewed as a biological machine; to filter, process and recycle what we conventionally think of as waste – sewage, effluent, garbage, waste water.

Says Philips, “Our world is sending us warning signals that we are disturbing its equilibrium. A drastic cut in our environmental impact is called for. This Probe explores how the solution is likely to come from biological processes, which are by nature less energy-consuming and non-polluting. We need to go back to nature in order to move forward.”

“Designers have an obligation to understand the urgency of the situation, and translate humanity’s needs into solutions. Energy-saving light bulbs will only take us so far. We need to push ourselves to rethink domestic appliances entirely, to rethink how homes consume energy, and how entire communities can pool resources” says Clive van Heerden, Senior Director of Design-led Innovation at Philips Design.

Exhibition: The Microbial Home, at the Piet Hein Eek Gallery during Dutch Design Week,
via: mocoloco

Monday, October 31st, 2011

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