design idea - watersaver 01

I've been thinking about a series of water saving devices.  It seems such a waste to not use water that is often just running down the plug hole whilst we brush our teeth, wash our faces or whilst showering.  The first simple idea is a hand basin thet fills a toilet cistern.  Once full the water simply overflows and goes down the drain. The cistern would self fill if there was more flushing than hand washing going on.

design idea - watersaver 03

Have a wash and grow your own.  A little tenuous I admit, although not un-achievable.  Apparently we are taking longer showers, which is using in some cases almost as much water as a bath, this water could be easily filtered from soap and go straight on the garden.  Wash your spuds, then water them!

green screw

I've been toying with ideas around making products more easy to separate for recycling.  Many products have too many hidden clips etc. What if on the back of a product, one green annodised screw denoted that by undoing it, the whole products constituent parts/materials would be easily separated.  Designing with this in mind would bring about different aesthetics.  Rather than try and hide the methods of fixing, we could make them a feature of the design.  A friend read this and pointed out that it wouldn't work on a car! I had had smaller electronic devices (radio's, mobile phones, TV remotes) in mind when I was musing.

design idea - Squash bottle

A thread on Core77.com discussed a new packaging design, where a consumer buys a spray pump with a bottle of concentrate, to which they add water. They then buy more concentrate as necessary. This cuts down on weight during transportation and saves throwing away the bottle. It got me thinking, if you could cut down on weight, you could also cut down on volume, making more environmental savings. I did a quick sketch for a collapsible bottle, something that has been done before, but not applied in this way because the volume always had to be 100%.
This started me thinking..... does reducing the volume of the bottle actually make any cost/environmental saving and if so , how much? Is there a tool to help designers easily calculate this? I couldn’t find one, so I’m now working on a calculator that I will put in the download section as soon as it’s finished.