27. Samovar

In the year 2000, an archeological discovery in Azerbaijan’s Shaki region suggested that 3,600 years ago, locals used samovar-like clay vessels to heat water for their meals. This fact challenged the assumption that samovars originated in late 18th century Russia, when the first charcoal-burning samovar factory was founded in Tula, near Moscow. Regardless of their origin, samovars were widely used in Russia up to the early 20th century to heat water for the home efficiently and to brew tea. Tea was introduced in the country from West Mongolia in the 17th century and quickly became a competitor to a popular drink made with hot water, medicinal herbs and honey that was brewed in a type of kettle called sbiten, the precursor of the samovar. By the end of the 19th century, there were about 160 different types of samovars and the object had become an icon of Russian lifestyle. A samovar is a large metal container with a small faucet at the bottom and a metal pipe running vertically throughout the middle. The pipe is filled with solid fuel (charcoal, dry pinecones, etc.) to heat the water surrounding it. A teapot is placed on top, and it is used to brew the zavarka -a strong concentrate of tea- which is served by diluting it with kipyatok -boiling water- from the main container usually in a 1 to 10 ratio. The standard capacity of samovars varies from 1 to 400 litres (0.25 to 100 gallons).

26. YiXing teapot

YiXing teapots are small enough to be considered personal brewing devices, holding one or two tea servings at most. The YiXing region is located 120 miles northwest of Shanghai, and it is known for a special kind of clay called zisha: zi means purple and sha means sand, although despite of the etymology of the word, zisha clay can be found in colors other than purple, such as red, yellow, green and blue. YiXing teapots have an endless variety of shapes and colors, but their main feature is purely functional: these teapots are not glazed and have the ability to absorb the tea flavor with continued usage. The fired clay contains tiny air pockets for insulation, which means that if one brews the same type of tea all the time, each brewing is a bit more flavorful than the one before, since the interior air pockets of the teapot absorb and retain the flavor of the brew. Although organized cultivation of Camellia Sinensis, the common tea plant, dates back to the IV century, the manufacturing of YiXing personalized tea-brewing pots did not begin until the Sung Dynasty (X to XII centuries), and did not become widely accepted until the Ming Dynasty (XIV to XVII centuries). The dissemination of YiXing ware, after it was initially brought to the Europe by the East India Trading Company, not only influenced the forms of European teapots, but also prompted the invention of hard-paste porcelain in the Western world.

25. Bamboo bowls

A series of prototypes executed using the process of pressure casting on slices of bamboo cane. These bowls are probes, studies on the possibilities of bamboo to redefine the personal everyday ecology of our domestic environments. They were produced in 1999 by one of my students, Oskar Kjörneberg, in an attempt to translate the linear quality of bamboo cane into the spatial qualities required for an open container. Bowls are familiar objects that we use to store, serve and transport food. These bowls are permeable and reflect the same principle found in the bamboo steamer: the possibility of letting something through –steam, water, air- in a way that it may affect, modify or transform what is contained. It is almost the antithesis of petroleum-based (plastic) hermetic containment, where hermeticism and impermeability are the prevailing qualities, and the separation between what is contained and the outside is inflexible. Some may say these are not practical objects, but what does practical mean, after all, when we talk about things? It is true that these bowls are not meant to hold liquids, or fine grains; they are designed to hold larger pieces, fruits and vegetables, perhaps, edibles of a certain size. The value of the experiment is to test the value of imperfection, and the possibilities imperfection yields when understood as a positive, rather than a negative, quality. These bowls criticize senseless containment in the way they define new types of relating to, and transporting, what we eat.

24. Bamboo steamer

Steam cooking is an Asian, centuries old, alternative to our conventional Western wet heat cooking methods. The standard tool used for steam cooking, the bamboo steamer, is a versatile object that has found a place in Western kitchens over the last decades. It is a simple, lightweight, durable artifact made entirely of bamboo, an abundant, renewable, material with a long tradition in Asian everyday environments. Bamboo steamers have slowly percolated into our culinary culture and are widely available in specialized and even mainstream kitchen stores. They are also relatively inexpensive. A steamer set usually includes 3 stackable pieces, 2 steamer layers and a lid. The steamer layers are cylindrical slices about 3 in. (7.5 cm.) thick, with a bamboo grill at the bottom, where food is placed for cooking. The size of the steamer varies, although a standard size could be 10" in. (25 cm.) in diameter and 6. 25 in. (15.8 cm.) in height. Bamboo steam cooking has tangible health advantages, such as better controlling the texture and color of vegetables, or making more nutritious meals since fewer vitamins and minerals are lost in the cooking process. To cook the food, the steamer is placed over a wok or a pot of boiling water. Sometimes herbs can be added to the water to allow an aromatic flavor to permeate the food when cooking. Yet another advantage to using this tool is that the process yields a delicious soup stock in the bottom of the pot.

23. Pressure cooker

Pressure cookers are a staple in Southern European kitchens. They are a fundamental tool to sustain the Mediterranean diet, a centuries-old way of eating based on the use of natural ingredients and simple cooking processes. Vegetables, legumes, meats and fish can be cooked in this sealed pot in a faster, more efficient, healthier way. The cooking process is about 70% faster and considerably more efficient, since it uses significantly less energy than conventional processes such as open-pot cooking or oven cooking. Due to the shorter cooking time and the fact that most of the water used in the cooking process remains in the pot and does not boil away, more vitamins and minerals from the ingredients are retained, making pressure cooking a healthier alternative to conventional cooking. A domestic pressure cooker is generally made of aluminum or stainless steel, and has three main elements: the pot, usually with a handle and a small knob placed diametrically opposite to it; the lid, a twist-on disc with a rubber seal underneath and a handle that aligns with the pot handle in the closed position; and a pressure valve, a small weight that releases part of the steam generated during the cooking process at a pressure of 15 psi. The dimensions of a standard 4-6 liter (15-22 gal.) capacity cooker are 40L x 27W x 25H cm. (15.7 x 10.6 x 9.8 in.), a good fit for European kitchens where space is often limited.

22. Vacuum coffee brewer

It is accepted that a Scottish naval engineer named Robert Napier invented the vacuum coffee brewer in 1840. The principle of a Napier coffeemaker is simple. Water is heated in a boiling vessel, which is sealed except for a pipe. The pipe passes from the base of the boiling vessel into the bottom of a coffee-brewing vessel via a filter. The heating process creates steam pressure which forces hot water through the pipe and into the brewing vessel where the ground coffee has been placed. When the heat is removed from the boiling vessel, the steam condenses and creates a vacuum which pulls the freshly brewed coffee back into the bottom vessel. The result is a boiling vessel full of perfectly filtered coffee brewed at the optimum temperature of just below boiling point. The advantage of this process is that the coffee can never be burned, since the heat is never directly applied to it but transferred via the boiling water. A remarkable example of this principle was designed mid last century by Abram Games. Games was a graphic designer who crafted fascinating posters and pamphlets in post-war London. His motto was maximum meaning, minimum means –no question somebody with that mantra could only produce great work. His Cona Rex coffee brewer displaces the traditional vertical positioning of the two vessels into a more dynamic diagonal setup. The object may seem fragile in terms of its operability, but who wouldn’t have it in her/his kitchen.

21. Portable coffee container

With an estimated annual worldwide consumption of more than 400 billion cups, coffee is probably the most popular beverage in the world. A transcultural fixture in everyday environments, coffee consumption has evolved from a slow ritual -taking the time to enjoy a cup of one’s favorite brew- to an almost mechanical habit. Portability has slowly emerged as a key feature in the structure of today’s coffee consumption. With it, a myriad of coffee-related objects has slowly taken a preponderant position in our lives. Most of them are single-functional and disposable, such as this large-capacity portable coffee container, designed to take a volume of 2.8 liters (96 fl. oz.) of the popular brew wherever one desires. This container permits to enjoy up to 12 cups of hot coffee at the office, the park or the car...not a minor accomplishment!. The container is a flat cardboard pop-up box with a mylar bag inside. In a single movement, the flat cardboard cutout becomes a squarish box with a handle and a protruding pouring spout. One way to understand this object is as a disposable thermos, because it adopts, although in a simplified way, the thermos’s double-chamber principle to keep the temperature of the beverage inside constant. In fact, the container is as wasteful as most of the objects that facilitate our society’s desire for on-the-go constant coffee consumption, although it is fair to say that it is, after all, a well designed and ingenious vessel.

>2 Resources (Objects 11-20)

I think it was Rousseau who eloquently explained that only human beings are to blame for the existence of private property. He said that once upon a time some human being decided to put a fence around a piece of land and call it hers (or his, who knows). Since nobody questioned such apalling measure -because there was plenty of land around so that everybody could do the same- the notion of private property was born. If only the other human beings had not allowed that first proprietor to arbitrarily privatize the land that belonged to all, private property would not exist today. This second set of objects (11-20) deals with the changing value of things: what today is chic, tomorrow will be passé; what today is important, tomorrow will be superfluous. The set begun with experience-based designs –Environmental Transformer and Flogiston Chair- and it ends with water-related objects that have the potential of becoming polemic soon. Indeed, the value of water is still not an issue in our comfortable Western part of the world because we have plenty. But predictions of the increasing desertification of the planet and the subsequent reduction of potable water available will make water a valuable resource very soon. When that happens, what today is an innocent product –a bottle of mineral water we carry in the subway with us to stay hydrated- will acquire a whole different value: shall we still think it is OK that a few global corporations control our planet’s water sources?

20. Mineral water

According to the Nestle web site, bottled water was born 12,000 years ago, when humans collected water from natural springs and stored it in vessels to take along with them in their migrations. Today, mineral water is a prosperous international business that supplies virtually every market on Earth. The choices are endless. In a not so distant past, bottled waters were branded as exclusive products or affordable luxuries. Today, advertisements stress that mineral water is a primordial necessity, and staying hydrated at all times a health benefit. Nobody knows exactly why in Western cultures hydration has become an addiction as of lately -all those busy professionals carrying water bottles in purses and briefcases at all times, as if ready to face a cataclysm. As in the case of the sea-going water bag, the pertinent question is how is it possible that a few are profiting from the commercialization of a natural resource, which is indeed going to become increasingly more precious in an increasingly short future. Constant hydration may well be today a trendy behavior for well-off Westerners, but it is a real necessity for billions of people who don’t have their minimum water supply needs met, or those who live in cities where tap water does not have the sanitary conditions to be suitable for consumption. There is yet another flaw to the business of selling mineral water in individual containers: the unnecessary production of plastic waste, the majority of which is never recycled.

19. Sea-going water bag

A bag of monumental scale, a sea-going bag designed for the bulk transportation of potable water. This type of towable bag was pioneered in the 80s as a lower cost alternative to potable water transportation in tankers and through pipelines. Fresh drinking water is lighter than seawater, and so this large water-filled object floats naturally when it is tugged to its destination. Large-scale water bags are made of a 2 mm-thick (0.83 in.) plastic-coated polyester fabric. A standard water bag has a length of 200 m. (656 ft.) and contains 35,000 tons of water. In 2001, Nordic Water Supply, the Norwegian company that pioneered this method of water transportation, had plans to manufacture bags that could contain up to 100,000 tons of water with a length similar to that of a supertanker (350m. / 1,148 ft.). A bag of such dimension may very well be the largest flexible container in the world. But its political implications are far more important than its size. With more than 1.7 billion people in the world lacking access to sanitary water supply and 33 countries facing water shortages, the corporatization of drinking water casts a grim shadow: by 2025, when more than 1 billion people will face absolute water scarcity according to predictions, a small group of private companies will be profiting from trading with water. How is it possible that drinkable water is a commodity and not a resource that belongs to all human beings?

18. Odre

Anyone seeing the form of an odre for the first time will easily conclude that it was made out of an animal’s full skin. A goat weighing 20 kg. (44 lb.) provides enough leather for a 90-liter (23.7-gallon) odre. Although an essential object in rural Spain’s economy for centuries, odres are today practically extinct as wine and olive oil storage and transportation containers. Tourists might still find some display pieces hanging from the ceiling in souvenir stores or museums, remnants of a more sustainable past where human beings were closer to nature. Today, the function of the odre has been entirely taken over by plastic crates, bottles and stackable containers with geometric, rather than animalized, forms. Odres were made from one single piece of leather -the animal’s full skin- for several reasons: to maximize the volume that can be contained per skin; to facilitate the lifting and transportation on human backs of such heavy load; and to preserve the integrity of the container with a form that naturally distributes the pressure of the liquid inside all over its surface so that it can resist tough handling without breaking. A long and complex leather treatment process preceded the handcrafting of odres: the leather was soaked in water and oak bark powder for a month, hung to dry, soaked in oil, hung again, painted with pez (see bota), sewn, filled with liquid and rinsed several times, and left to dry before it was ready to be used.

17. Bota

The bota –wineskin- is a typical Spanish flexible container used to store wine and keep it cool. A widely used everyday object, particularly in rural Spain, the origin of the bota is unclear. Some maintain its archetype is Greek, citing that Ulysses used one to inebriate the Cyclops Poliphemos in Homer’s Odyssey, although it is commonly accepted that this object has had a presence in Spanish culture for centuries -including a stellar role in Cervantes’s masterwork Don Quijote. Botas are light, resistant, portable, ergonomic, durable and easy to maintain. Their capacity oscillates between 1/2 and 3 liters (0.13 to 0.80 gallons), and their iconic teardrop shape remains the same for the different sizes. Botas are handmade and take advantage of local craft traditions; their production remains small but constant. Botas are generally made of goat’s leather. Their interior is treated with a resinous product called pez, which is extracted from pine trees and treated at high temperatures before it is applied to the leather to make it fully impermeable. The two pieces that form a bota are joined in one seam that is both sewn and glued, to avoid leakage. It runs through the object’s perimeter, providing a small groove where the red cotton thread that is used to carry the object nests. Drinking from a bota is easy –squeezing the body pushes the wine at pressure through the spout’s small hole- although avoiding getting a few wine drops in your shirt is a bit harder.

16. Pillow

Pillows are ever-present, transcultural objects. Every household in the world has many. You can find them in trains and planes, some of them have been incorporated to the traveler’s seat, confirming that a pillow is an object of need rather than luxury. As an object, a pillow is brilliant in its simplicity: a rectangular bag filled with down, feathers, felt or foam. Its form is customized to the user’s need to provide a transition between body and supporting surface. Is the pillow about health, or about comfort? Is it a piece of furniture, a personal item, an accessory? Modern consumerism has developed dozens of pillow types. Many are marketed around the promise of improving your body health, or at least arresting its deterioration. Others are highly specialized: pillows for children, pregnant women, couch-potatoes, travelers and sybarites; pillows for cushioning, relieving neck stiffness, improving sleep or relaxing cervical muscles; pillows with names: The Sound Asleep memory pillow promises to eliminate snoring; the Festo Sleep pillow is an inflatable cushion for at-work cat-napping; the UltraFoam memory pillow, originally developed by NASA and made out of hypoallergenic polyurethane foam –also called memory foam- adapts to your head or body like a mold, and then returns to its original shape; the Mediflow water pillow is designed to absorb the 50-plus head shifts and turns we average during a night’s sleep so that we can get up well rested. That is ultimately what comfort is all about.

15. Egyptian headrest

In ancient Egypt, wooden headrests –often made out of cedar due to its softness and aromatic properties- were used in everyday life in the same way that we use pillows today. They were an essential part of the household’s inventory since their appearance in the Second Dynasty, around 2,500 BC. Headrests were small objects, about 21 cm. (8.25 in.) H x 19 cm. (7.5 in.) W. x 8 cm. (3.15 in.) D. The simple type of headrest was carved from a single piece of wood, and had a broad rectangular base, designed for stability, a stem, and a cupped surface where the head rested padded with linen. Although this type barely changed throughout three centuries of Egyptian civilization –the Blue Glass Headrest of Tutankhamen being the perfect paradigm- there were multiple design variations and types. The one in the picture was made out of two interlocking pieces for collapsibility and height adaptability. Besides its domestic value, headrests were also important afterlife objects. Monolithic funerary headrests, made out of ivory or marble, were buried with the dead in the belief that they had magical powers to wake the dead from their sleep and help them begin their afterlife. There was another (pragmatic) reason for the use of headrests: to keep the mummy’s head from coming off of the body. Headrests forbore the modern notion of multifunctionality: they were symbol, ritualistic tool, health aid, comfort provider, priced possession, status setter and funerary icon, all in one.

14. Video goggles

A small, personal media viewer was recently launched under the promise of revolutionizing the world of portable electronics. The futuristic-looking artifact is an ultra light binocular –cleverly named video goggles- that allows users to watch portable video, television programs, or Internet content displayed onto two full color micro displays positioned right in front of their eyes. The content is received via cellular phone or iPod, and the displayed images are equivalent to a 12-inch screen as seen from three feet away. The binocular is not terribly advanced as an object: a gadget-looking artifact of impersonal appearance, black and neutral, like most objects directly derived from the application of a specific new technology. The main positive feature of the video goggles is thinness: it allows users to look and see around the screen and remain aware of their surroundings, very much in the same way that users of bifocal reading glasses negotiate their attention between the pages of the book they are reading and the environment they see when they look up and over their glasses. This is certainly a step forward from the tyrannical immersive nature of most media electronic gadgets that work by isolating users from their surroundings. Senseless technology? I think so, unless the content would be an empowering and intellectually nutritious addition to the user’s leisure time, rather than a (dumb) way to kill time. After all, common sense is usually too much to ask when it comes to new electronic gadgets.

13. Igaak

Although it rarely causes permanent vision loss, snow blindness is a painful condition caused by overexposing the eyes to snow-reflected sunlight. Inuits figured this out about 2,000 years ago, when they first developed igaak –inuit snow goggles. The first igaak examples were carved out of caribou antlers, the only suitable local material at the time. Wooden examples appeared centuries later, when increasing mobility and travel made wood available. The new material was a lighter, easier to carve, alternative to the hard -and durable- bone. Yet, centuries-old wooden igaak have been preserved to date in excellent condition, after years of being used in some of the harshest inhabited environments on Earth. The design of igaak is brilliant: a segment of material, hollowed in the back, sometimes purely rectangular and massive, sometimes markedly close in form to some of the high-fashion sunglasses as we know them today. Most types of igaak are slightly curved, designed to adapt to the user’s face snugly. They are fastened to the back of the head by a cord usually made of caribou sinew or leather. There is something intriguing about the way this ancient object fulfills its function: the user’s field of vision is restricted to what can be perceived through a narrow slit –of just a few millimeters- that radically reduces the amount of sunlight that reaches the user’s eyes. It also frames the field of vision in an unusual way: it is like seeing the world from a small crack in the wall.

12. Flogiston chair

High science meets high consciousness. The Flogiston chair is the hedonistic toy Romans would have given their right hand to have back in the days. Like a vital stat monitor or a flight simulator, the Flogiston chair is one of those pure-feature objects that are so hard to describe (as objects) because they are only about what they do, and what they do is so purely high-tech that it is not very interesting. What is interesting is that the Flogiston chair is an object that is an experience. A commercial spinoff of a NASA undertaking to develop an immersive training system for astronauts, it was invented in 1989. Its inventor, Brian Park, wanted to develop a reclining chair based on the posture experienced in zero gravity, the posture that the body naturally falls into when external forces are reduced. The Flogiston chair really an immersive mini-environment. The user’s head is surrounded by a frosted fibreglass dome onto which images are projected. The effect is that of a personal IMAX theatre. The chair’s electric / pneumatic base provides a vibration effect synchronized with several other audio-visual and sensorial effects. Using software, sound and light are mixed to induce different brain frequencies in the user. Integrated speakers set up various bi-neural beats to entrain the occupants into specific alpha, beta and theta wave states. The state of total situation awareness that the user experiences defines, 40 years later, the psychedelic proposals of the 60s and 70s.

11. Environment Transformer

Environment Transformer was an essential component of the Gelbes Hertz experiment. Visitors to the pulsating yellow microenvironment wore it as a prop for maximum enhancement of their sensorial individual experience inside the pod. In a hypothetical taxonomy of objects, the Environment Transformer would be closer to the 3D paper glasses than to the helmet in that it was not about protecting the brain, but about expanding it: an artificial spherical transparent layer designed to enhance visual and acoustic sensory input, whatever that meant at the time (1968). The form of this wearable pod resembles the compound eye of arthropods, seasoned with the ever-present space-age visual vocabulary that anticipated a technological future that was just around the corner. This object was a materialization of science fiction, the popular way of designating the visionary, techno-heavy aesthetic that took the film and literary industries by storm back then. Arthropods was, in fact, the identity name that designated the brief -if intense- international movement of architects and designers that attempted to define a new humanism based on a social order in which design would be a bottom-up –rather than a top-down- universal right. This humanism materialized by means of homemade, temporary, environment-changing, participatory, experiments and pod-like apparatuses such as the Environment Transformer. Objects became catalysts, activators, short-lived mediators that allowed society to catch a glimpse of a future in which design, science and technology formed the magic triad, the fundamental, all-encompassing social foundation that allowed free expression.

>1 Linkages (Objects 1-10)

One of the most counterproductive habits of design is its obstinacy in singling out objects. Designed objects, the ones we see in magazines or trade shows, are always presented in isolation, as if they did not have to deal with the mundane reality of being in a context occupying a position within a larger frame of reference. The main tenet of (commercial) design is to underline how objects are different from other objects –what is described in a simplistic way as unique. This blog started precisely from the opposite premise: that all objects are linked to other objects and there is no such thing as a really independent object. It started with an anonymous urban artifact –I called it the shoe-polishing station- and it keeps going under the general rule that every entry is linked to the preceding one in one way or another: the human-pulled rickshaw was the result of thinking about how the shoe-polishing station makes its way through the city of Coyoacan, and what is the importance of personal urban mobility; Restless Ball, an object I have known well for years, was suggested by the form of Velotaxi, the notion of participatory mobility and today's fascination with the culture of the 60s and 70s, etc. The objects around us could be classified in many different ways. It has been an interest of mine to think about those ways of taxonomizing the things we know –or don’t really know even if we think we do- and finding ways of linking them. Some of these first ten objects I have chosen for this blog are related to personal mobility. Their outstanding feature is their scale: they are not small, hand-held things; they are not furniture; they are not decorative props; they cannot be transported; they are designed to transport. They belong to the next scale up, the scale that allows users to get in and operate them. It is a different type of interaction than the one we have with a coffee mug, or a briefcase.

10. Gelbes Hertz

A womblike inhabitable object designed for emotional release. A catharsis activator for the nomadic lifestyle. A pleasure machine. A concupiscent urban hideaway. Haus-Rucker-Co, a Vienna-based group of artists and architects, presented Gelbes Hertz –yellow heart- in 1968. The idea was that a concentrated spatial experience could lead to changes in consciousness. Gelbes Hertz was one of the group’s first mind-expanding experiments. Melding the formal language of space-age technology with psychedelic and futuristic formal codes, Gelbes Hertz was designed as a mini-habitat for relaxation, a mini-pleasure dome. Through a lock made of three yellow air rings, one arrived at a transparent plastic mattress offering just enough space for two people. The mattress was in a spherical capsule approximately 3 meters (9.8 ft.) in diameter. The capsule was supported by a metal frame and raised from the ground. Lying there, one could perceive that the air-filled pillows –double-layered chambers of translucent PVC- whose swelling sides almost touched the inhabitants, slowly moved. The effect was that the surrounding space expanded until it formed a translucent sphere and, then, contracted again, mimicking the systolic-diastolic rhythm of the heart. Large dots arranged in a grid on the outer and inner surfaces of the air-shells changed in rhythmic waves from milky patches to a clear pattern. The space pulsated at extended intervals. The object’s behavior was a metaphor for sexuality: both the spherical form of the capsule and the pleasure-seeking experience of its inhabitants were achieved through the principle of pumping.

09. Hovery

Hovery is a personal hovercraft. This notion alone is intriguing. It propounds the question of the real value of all-terrain personal mobility. It also sets forth the possibilities of a mode of transportation that is truly all-terrain, within limits, and the real functionality of such thing. In fact, the difficulty with this object is to establish whether its nature is ludic or functional: is it an expensive toy, or a necessary tool? Truly collapsible, Hovery is high-performance in its features: it inflates from the exhaust of a small 2-stroke engine and is capable of cruising over any type of terrain, wet or dry. It is about 2,25 m. (7.4 ft.) in diameter, weights a mere 48 kg. (106 lb.), and has a range of 1 hour at a top speed of 50 km/h (30 mph). It can be folded into a volume of 0,5 m3 (18 cu. ft.) to fit in the trunk of a car, and it can be assembled and ready to use in a few minutes. Hovery is more an invention than an object, and looks nuts-and-boltsy and unrefined in its aspect and interface. The driver sits atop and controls the vehicle with a joystick, an aeronautical feature that explains the object’s origin: Hovery was invented by aeronautical engineer and pilot Alberto Dei Castelli. His company, Aero DC, prides itself of selling Hoveries to the five continents. The question is how long until Hoveries become the mobile support of bright-colored advertisements.

08. La Ballule

Gilles Ebersolt, the architect who designed La Ballule, defines it as an all-terrain, playful, locomotion machine for all ages. Also called l’Ultraballe –Ultraball- La Ballule is a large-scale toy, an object designed for play. On another level, it is also a personal vehicle propelled by gravity, a transparent membrane capable of engaging the landscape, and this way of defining it underlines its objectual value beyond its ludic capabilities. Ebersolt developed his first concepts of a vehicle for downhill travel in the mid 70s. He refined it in the mid 80s to an inflated 4-meter sphere with a smaller inner sphere 2 meters in diameter, where the passenger travels. Connecting both chambers, a tube provides access to the inner sphere which is concentric with the larger sphere and suspended from it by tension cables, a sort of three-dimensional version of the spokes in a bicycle wheel. This system allows the object to sustain drops of more than 10 m. (32 ft) with the passenger cushioned safely inside. A version with a diameter of 6 m. (19.7 ft) was built in 1985 to descend Mount Fujiyama. As a pneumatic object, La Ballule has certain sophistication beyond the youthful idealism of the initial structures gonflables –inflatable structures- that utopian European architects adopted as the perfect mediators of the new social and cultural order back in the late 60s. Its spherical shape is functional, efficient and iconic: it suggests motion, inhabitation and inhabitation in motion.

07. Restless Ball

An object that is pure geometry, a sphere. Many objects are spherical or quasi-spherical; very few are inhabitable spheres. In 1970, a duo of rebellious Austrian architects under the name of Coop Himmelblau, created Restless Ball. They defined it as an inflated vinyl bubble for the activities of multiple people. The idea of the mini-environment as a bridge between building and object, between architecture and design, was a staple of the productive sixties (in design, the sixties were really from mid-60s to mid-70s). Proposals for pneumatic objects, environments, buildings and even cities were then the new face of radical design in Europe. As object, a transparent inhabitable sphere 5 meters in diameter sounds more playful than revolutionary: the proof is that in 1998, some clever guy named Charles Jones simply knocked-off the idea, renamed it Waterball, and claimed that he had invented it just for fun. Fun might have been a factor in Coop Himmelblau’s first projects, but Restless Ball was about more than fun. It was an experiment on active participation, an object designed to foster human interaction. It was also about a new form of mobility: collective, human-powered mobility. Unlike the bicycle, the skateboard or the Sedgway, for example, all of them designed for individual use, Restless Ball was multi-propelled. It was also multi-functional: a vehicle; an environment; a prop for happenings and group events; a test for the (back then) new technology of pneumatic structures, and an exercise in design with new materials.

06. Velotaxi

Velotaxis are human-powered tricycles designed for urban recreational transportation. The concept was born in Berlin and then spread to over 35 cities worldwide such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beirut, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Seoul or Vienna. Velotaxis are mainly about advertising, although they are marketed as an ecological mode of transportation that is fun, non-polluting and quiet. The standard Velotaxi, the City Cruiser, is manufactured in 100% recyclable polyethylene over a steel framework, and weights around 150 kg. (330 pounds). The vehicle is approximately 3 meters long (9,8 ft.) and 1,1 meter wide (3,6 ft.). It has a small 250 w. back-up electric motor energized by two rechargeable 12 v. batteries. The motor disconnects automatically when the vehicle reaches a speed of 11 km/h (6,8 mph). Velotaxis are called VeloLeo in Italy, Wielertaxi in the Netherlands or Trixi in Spain. In Barcelona, Trixis are seasonal and operate between April and October. They circulate in prescribed sightseeing routes around the city and their fare is 18 € ($21) for a one-hour ride. Companies such as Starbucks, Nike, Siemens, Coca Cola or Auna are already benefiting from the visibility of these urban mobile objects. As a modern-day, capitalist, Western adaptation of the Asian cycle rickshaws, Velotaxis have quickly developed their own cultural identity without the socio-economic burdens that comparable vehicles have in Asia: rather than rural migrants, European Velotaxi drivers are young, (cool), well-educated international individuals, male or female. They speak several languages and want to earn their living doing something fun.

05. Fender helmet

Discarded bicycle fenders are the skin of this helmet, a post-industrial metaphor of the feathers of a rara avis –a rare bird- an extinct species perhaps, certainly urban and possibly majestic. This object is clearly not about safety. It is about rebellion and marginal symbolism. It is somehow about subversion. Daniel Richheimer was still a student when he designed it in 2001. As one of his thesis advisors, I remember his work well: he developed a series of mutant bicycles from discarded bicycle fragments found in junkyards and second-hand stores. He also developed related products and accessories capable of defining a new urban subgroup with a strong cultural identity. Although the process of using found objects to create new ones was far from innovative at the time, the context of personal urban mobility gave it an interesting twist: Daniel’s collage cycles were designed to became cult objects, excessive contraptions that subverted the accepted paradigm of efficient, aerodynamic, lightweight human-powered objects. The helmet speaks of excess and non-functionality as much as it dwells in the post-modern perversion that more is more, particularly when applied to a field –individual transportation- that is always about less and less. The conceptual process of cutting and pasting (finding and using, selecting and assembling) that generated this object is similar to the one Indian manufacturers use to build ever-different cycle rickshaws and, yet, the rickshaws are mainly about durability and functionality: they can’t afford to be cultural.

04. Cycle rickshaws

In India, human-powered transportation tricycles are known as cycle rickshaws. In Delhi, most cycle-rickshaw pullers are seasonal rural migrants. Pulling also attracts a large number of traditional artisans and craftspeople, who are willing to leave their age-old trades in exchange for an occupation that provides instant income without financial risk. Cycle rickshaws were introduced in Delhi in the 1940’s as a technological advancement to hand-pulled rickshaws. Today, they provide a vital public transportation service, especially for low-income urban groups (a kilometer-long ride costs about 5 Rupees – 2 cents of a dollar). There is a vibrant rickshaw-related informal economy in the city of Delhi that includes contractors (owners), pullers, mechanics and manufacturers of an astonishing variety of cycle rickshaws designed for transportation of people and goods. The vehicles are often eclectic, colorful, ad-hoc assemblages of found parts and pieces. They could be considered customized by circumstances, limited resources and creative know-how: there are no two cycle rickshaws alike. A few years ago, the government of Delhi restricted and/or banned the circulation of cycle rickshaws in several parts of the city. It sanctioned policies that allowed the confiscation and destruction of so-called illegal rickshaws. According to social activist Madhu Kishwar, this led to an escalating web of illegality involving bribes, extortion and blackmail: government inspectors and the local police agreed with rickshaw owners to a system of monthly payments as protection money although, apparently, paying not always guaranteed that the vehicles would not be confiscated.