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 02

Why not have a storage tank for filtered water that would otherwise go down the drain.   Once again a stop cock could divert water away from the filter once the tank was full.  If the mains burst etc it would mean the household still had a source of clean drinkable water.

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!

design idea - improved dust pipe

A quick bit of work with the saw and the design prototype has been improved.  It does give advantages over the dust mask as your lips create a seal around the tube so no dust can get in.  With nasal plugs you would avoid the risk of breathing in through the nose, but as discussed in the last post.  The draw backs are still the same.

design idea - dust pipe

I've been making a lot of models recently, but the disposable masks I wear to stop breathing in all the dust I create, never seem to properly fit (could be the masks or just the shape of my face).  The problem is designing something that fits properly around everyones nose and mouth.

Whilst pondering this problem, I came up with a dust pipe concept, like a smokers pipe with dust mask parts covering the intake.  Initial experiments prove that it is not ideal.  It works as long as you remember not to breath through your nose and it needs an inbuilt reservoir to collect all the drool you breath down the pipe.  Also shortening it so that it fits much closer to the face away from what your working on will help or an adaption to a divers snorkle? It's a work in progress!

Please consider the idea and not be distracted by my freaky monkey hand.

design idea - boiling hot kettle

Following my recent kettle design project, I can't help wonder why kettles are not insulated to save time and energy when reboiling.  We've all boiled a kettle then not used that water because friends have been delayed etc, then reboiled the water on their arrival to make a cup of tea.  My question would be, would the energy lost in manufacturing kettles with insulated walls be won back with interest, by saving energy on reboiling over the life of the kettle.  Fire risk aside, maybe all current kettles should be given jumpers, just like the traditional tea cosy.

design idea - Dental floss

I bought a box of dental sticks/floss harps (one stick pictured) but it seems such a waste to use them and throw them away, although I must admit, having the floss held in a bow is much better than pulling floss from a reel and doing the sawing action with both hands (bleeding gums!). 

So I've been thinking about combining the best elements of both.  A replaceable cartridge holds the floss, which with a simple stop device allows the user to pull off one revolution of floss from the reel.  The old section of floss is held fast and cut off in the floss lock.  Replacement cartridges could be sold, greatly reducing the ammount of waste.  There may be a few hygeine issues, but the one piece device could be easily washable, which is only the same as using a toothbrush.

mugged

All the mugs I own are of different shapes and sizes and I've been musing about ways to make them more easy to carry, without using a tray, so I've been looking at designing one with a non slip rubberised area, that stops the other two from slipping and spilling, or designing mugs with ribs, that lock together when picked up, to make it easier to carry 3/4 cups to a table without a tray.

design idea - plugger

I have a friend who works for the NHS.  She told me that none of the sinks in hospitals have plugs for infection control. Washing in a sink is carried out by leaving the tap running, which wastes huge ammounts of water (throughout all the hospitals in the UK) and makes it very difficult to control temperature if the sink has separate taps.

I started thinking about making a disposable plug from starch based plastics, until I realised that all I really needed was a disk of card - the waxy variety used for coffee cups.  It wouldn't need to be very robust to withstand 15 minutes of one sided immersion, then be pulled out and put in the bin.  It would also be very difficult to be used twice, because once water logged it would start to degrade and it would be very cheap to produce.  I'm sure the problem and solution is not as simple as a disk of card, but something like this could give greater patient experience and cut down on wasting water.

design idea - potted

I've jsut been watching a friend try and re-pot a new plant.  The plant would not come out of the old pot, so in the end she had to knife down the side of the pot to free the plant, leaving a broken pot that no one can do anything with.  I'm sure its been done, but I cannot see why every pot used by gardening centres cannot have tabs that allow it to be splt and then put back together again.  The cost of the extra tooling could be amortized into the price of the plant, cutting down on long term waste by making something much more reusable.  With careful design the plant pot could still be one piece, to save pieces becomming separated and lost.

design idea - chopper the knife

Its personal preference, but if I could just use one knife for food preparation, then it would have to be a cleaver for functionality.  However, I find a serrated blade as well as a sharp edge useful. 

The problem with combining both cutting edges on a knife is that it can make the knife difficult to sharpen.

The quick design I came up with is to put the serrated blade on an angle, so that you can get the best of both worlds, having the straight blade closest to the handle for fast cutting control.

Just a thought.

design idea - lif(t)able

I have a sideboard that things regularly fall down the back of and I'd love to be able to clean under it once a year without having to lift all the contents out to move it, so I've been toying with the idea of furniture with pistons in each corner.  By fitting a tyre pump to a hidden port I could pump the sideboard up high enough to get a vacuum cleaner under it, without worrrying about the contents falling over.  Once finished a simple valve release would allow the cabinet to gently fall back to the floor.  If I didn't want to make it part of the aesthetic, I'd just put a cover on the port and no one would be any the wiser about how much more useable the piece of furniture was.

design idea - PCB recycling

Much of our computer waste is recycled in India by children sat over gas burners, melting circuit boards to try and extract the metals (picture courtesy of Greenpeace India), many get lead poisoning from the fumes. I was trying to think of a solution, improving the salvaging conditions with extractor fans and better equipment is one approach, but I focused on the PCB. I started wondering if you could print a PCB, I’ve seen paint that has enough of a metal base to conduct electricity. I then saw the work of Sam Buxton, a designer who acid etches sheet metal. If the problem of extraction is based on the current method of board manufacture, my though was to acid etch (or laser cut) the metal before bonding, then adhere it to the board using a water-soluble solution. This would allow much easier recycling, because the board wouldn’t need to be robust enough to survive an acid bath. Dipping the board in a tank of water would allow the etched metal to come away. The board could then become more easily recyclable. A board would be layered with adhesive (1), the etched metal sheet laid on top (2) holes would be drilled (3) and the individual boards cut out (4).

design idea - Ski Boot

Tis the ski season! Last year I was a beginner who kept falling over and then couldn't get back into my bindings, because the soles of my boots were jammed with compacted snow.  So I started thinking about a beginners boot that the snow couldn't stick too.  One idea is to have sprung sealed rubber discs in the soles so snow is compacted into them and then pushed out, when you lift your feet, reducing the surface area it has to adhere to.  It would also give better grip when walking back to the chalet after a busy day.

design idea - torch light

Recently I've experienced a series of powercuts.  The first time I couldn't find the torch, the second time I realised I hadn't recharged it.  So I though about designing a table lamp that was the torch and recharged it everytime it was used.  Depending on brightness and power consumption, it could use two different bulbs, one for table lamp mains power and one for torch light battery power.

Toasted

Over my breakfast this morning I was thinking about toaster designs and how most of the time I only want to toast one piece of bread.  If there was a button somewhere on the toaster that switched off the elements in one of the compartments, would it save power? I think so, which could potentially make a huge energy saving over the whole country. It would certainly prolong the life of the toaster.  The button could be highly visual and tactile, not needing an L.E.D indicator and would cost very little for manufacturers to add.