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If youre tuning in to the Milan Cortina Olympics, you may be one of many spectators whos suddenly invested in the sport of curling. Youre in good company: Swedish designer Gustaf Westman, best known for his chunky homeware, has become so fascinated by the event that he used it as inspiration for his latest design. Curling centers on an object called a curling stone. Using its gooseneck handle, competitors slide the round, 44-pound stone down an ice shuffleboard toward a target zone. Westmans curling bowl, which he debuted on Instagram on February 10, reimagines the object as a snack bowl. The stones handle has been cleverly converted into the perfect slot for a glass of wine, or whatever beverage suits the moment, while its round base has been repurposed into a vessel for chips, crackers, and popcorn. The bowl is not listed for sale on Westman’s website at the time of this writing. Iconic Olympics-related objects like the ceremonial torch, cauldron, and medals may receive the most attention at the Games, but Westmans new bowl gives the curling stone the flowers its owed. View this post on Instagram Designing the curling bowl Before Westman reimagined the curling stone as a receptacle for popcorn and charcuterie, it was already one of the most interesting pieces of sports gear at the Winter Olympics. Since 2006, every single stone thats been thrown at the Games has been manufactured at one factory on the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig. Thats because the islands microgranite is formed by fast-cooling magma, which makes it ultra dense and hardperfectly suited for slamming into other curling stones at speed. Every stone is shaped, weighted, and polished to enable it to slide across the ice like butter, essentially making each a very precisely engineered work of art. View this post on Instagram Like his other designs (see Westmans whimsical collection for Ikea and puzzle-inspired shelf, for example), the bowl is pleasantly chunky, rounded, and colorful. In place of the stones usual handle is a two-pronged appendage that allows a beverage to hover directly over a spot for snacks. Overall, the bowl leans more toward artistic than performance-driven, but it does take after the real thing in one key way: It can slide. In a video posted to his Instagram, Westman tested out his design at what appears to be a local rink, sending it shooting down the ice with potato chips, wine, and several bunches of grapes on board. At home, spectators might use this function to pass hors d’oeuvres down the table while enjoying the Games. “I love being present and commenting on the time we are living in with my design,” Westman told Dezeen. “I also think humor has a big place in designthis is a great example of that for me.
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E-Commerce
For consumer packaged goods, the path from product idea to store shelves runs directly through the center of Unilever‘s new North American headquarters, and not just because the company makes market-saturating products like Hellmann’s mayonnaise and TRESemmé shampoo. This new headquarters space was designed specifically to put the entire process of product creation on display in its office, from ideation to development to marketing to retailing. Spread across 111,000 square feet in downtown Hoboken, New Jersey, Unilever’s newly opened headquarters is centered around an accessible spine of rooms and facilities that are optimized for bringing new products to market. There are “innovation labs” where ideas for new products come to life, workstations where ideas can take shape, a test kitchen and salon where products get sampled and refined, and a retail lab where the company and its retail partners can see the products as they’ll look on store shelves. “We want people to walk in and just immediately know what it is we stand for and what it is we do,” says Nathaniel Barney, Unilever’s global head of workplace services, travel, and fleet. “Not just to see it on the walls, because images come and go, but actually to feel it in the design.” [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] Unilever’s new headquarters is about a third of the size of the company’s previous suburban campus, 12 miles north in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The smaller size prioritizes the collaboration required to develop its wide range of consumer products across personal care, beauty and wellbeing, foods, and home care. In the post-pandemic context, it’s also a recognition that the company didn’t actually need its big suburban footprint, according to Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA. “When you’re like we are, now three days a week [in the office], actually those three days are all about connection, creativity, collaboration,” he says. “That’s why this design was built for the future.” Bringing Unilver’s products to life Unilever worked with the architecture firm Perkins & Will to design the space, centering its most collaborative product development functions in a spine that connects the entire office. Accessible by anyone passing by or taking a meeting in a nearby private room or sitting aside one of the picture windows with wide angle views across the Hudson River to Lower Manhattan, the product development spine is meant to draw in peopleand ideasfrom across the company. [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] One easy draw, especially for a company in the food business, is the flavor-wafting test kitchen. “It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the space,” says Mariana Giraldo, design principal at Perkins and Will’s New York studio. “Right behind reception, there are two windows into the kitchen, so there’s no way you can miss it.” Employees get a chance to see new foods and flavors being developed live, and also get a chance to taste products that may be coming to market years down the line. The test kitchen is also part of the product pipeline, where new ideas get piloted and refined. [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] Down the spine, “innovation labs” are intended to be blank spaces where those ideas can be born. Intentionally open and flexible in their furnishings and equipment, the labs leave themselves open to interpretation and reconfiguration. [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] For products farther along in the product development timeline, there are spaces with a higher gloss and purpose, including the test kitchen and a fully equipped salon. Both can be used for research and development as products take shape, but also for marketing purposes when products are heading to shelves. Each doubles as a stage set. [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] Beyond serving the product development process, these spaces are meant to attract employees and encourage more engagement with the creative side of the business. Giraldo says the design team approached these spaces as amenities within the workplace. “Here, the amenities didn’t have the purpose of just being amenities for the for the sake of it, but really being amenities that connected back to the product, and that connected back to exactly the work being developed here,” she says. Shrinking desk space Product development also relies on heads-down and desk-centric tasks, so there are regular workstations and meeting areas in Unilever’s headquarters. But even these are shaped by the company’s focus on collaboration. Barney says that the new office carved out much more space for one-on-one meetings and smaller group interactions, and ditched formal conference rooms for large spaces that could expand or contract to host larger groups and events. (The test kitchen, for one, opens out to a common area, making it easy to integrate into an all-hands meeting or a large-scale taste test.) [Photos: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] “Today we need probably two times the number of small rooms to what we had five or six years ago,” Barney says. “What we see a huge need for is places where we can have groups of 35 to 50 people come together and then have another 20 to 30 people on screen, if not more . . . We had to create spaces that were designed around a very different set of criteria.” [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] While Unilever’s headquarters was designed to create products and, by extension, profits, there’s an emphasis on informality across the space. That’s tied to an ethos Patel says is integral to the company’s culture. “We wanted to create a space and a location where our organization would love wasting time with each other,” he says. “We believe wasting time together is when culture blossoms. That’s when you get to know the person, you get to know what’s going on in their lives. There’s so much more than just work.” [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] If that time wasting among employees leads to an idea for a new body wash concept or mayo recipe, all the better. They won’t have to go far to start turning those ideas into the products of the future.
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E-Commerce
Ill admit it: I still secretly prefer cooking on a gas stove despite knowing that Im breathing in benzene and adding to methane emissions. What can I say, I like the tactile control of an open flame. But recently I tested an induction range that made my gas stove seem antiquated. Charlie, from the Bay Area-based startup Copper, offers a high-end range that can do everything I expect from my current stoveand more. The appliance, which started to roll out nationally last year, has been called “the Tesla of induction stoves” by The New York Times and lauded by chefs including Christopher Kimball. I wanted to try it out as a home cook with only basic skills. [Photo: Copper Home] An oven thats 30x more accurate Like most electric ovens, Charlie’s performs better than its gas counterparts. But it also surpasses the typical electric version. It preheats to 350 degrees in about four minutes, thanks in part to a large battery hidden at the base of the stove. (More on the battery later.) I tried baking some cookies, which browned up perfectly, and then turned the heat down to 80 degrees to test another unique feature: The oven can hold a steady low temperature, making it possible to proof bread or pastry quickly when needed. Gas ovens tend to cycle heat more aggressively, and even the pilot light alone can push temperatures too high. Standard electric ovens are better, but also cant reliably keep the temperature low enough. Id brought along some chocolate croissants and tried proofing them; the oven worked like a professional proofing drawer, which meant not having to wonder how the temperature and humidity in the kitchen would affect the rise of the dough. [Photo: Copper Home] The oven is incredibly precise. Most ovens fluctuate as much as 30 degrees above or below the set temperature. But incorporating a battery enables Coppers Charlie to use more sophisticated controls, including modern temperature sensors and actuators. Thanks to a recent firmware update, Charlies temperature varies no more than a single degree. Put another way, its 30 times more accurate than a typical oven. The seesawing temperatures in other ovens lead to baked goods with burnt edges, soggy bottoms, or mushy middles. The software updatedubbed Soufflé after the notoriously finicky dish it was designed to mastermakes Charlies baking capability even more consistent. Sure, it might take away some entertainment: Would you watch the Great British Baking Show without the suspense of unpredictable results? But in real life, its the kind of tool that actually makes me want to bake more often. [Photo: Copper Home] The cooktop is intuitive and more precise than gas Unlike some other induction stoves, the cooktop is easy enough to use without turning to the instruction manual. It has knobs, like a traditional range, rather than a touchscreen. When you turn one of the knobs, a display shows how hot the burner is. On the cooktop, to stand in for the visual cue of a gas flame, a bar of lights shows whether youve cranked up the heat a little or a lot. Like other induction stoves, it can boil water incredibly quickly. (The battery gives an extra boost: A pot of 8 ounces of water boils in 4 minutes and 10 seconds.) It can also precisely control temperature. I tried melting chocolate in a pan, something that would normally be a more complicated process with a double boiler on a regular stove, and the steady low temperature helped it melt evenly. Though I didnt try making dinner, the stove seems more than capable of handling anything I might normally prepare. It’s possible, for example, to crank up the heat and stir-fry something in a flat-bottomed wok, as Copper has demonstrated in previous tests; despite the lack of flames, the pan can get hot enough to char noodles for a dish like pad see ew. [Photo: Copper Home] Why theres a battery inside Some induction stoves have an annoying buzz, caused by pulsing AC power from the outlet that creates vibrations that are especially noticeable in tri-ply pans with multiple different kinds of metl. The Charlie stove, by contrast, is remarkably quiet, thanks to its battery. That battery, with 5 gigawatt-hours of energy storage, also means the stove can keep running for days even if the power goes out in a storm (notably, most modern gas stoves wont work if the electricity goes out, since they use electric ignition and electric safety valves). The battery also has other advantages that I didnt get to test. First, it means the stove doesnt require expensive electrical upgrades, something thats necessary with most other powerful induction stoves. The stove needs a large boost of power when it starts, but it can pull that from the battery. Because the battery can charge when power is cheapestfor example, in the middle of the day in California, when the grid has extra solar powerit can help keep customers bills lower. As the network of appliances grows, they form a virtual power plant that can also help the grid itself. A distributed network of batteries in appliances is easier to deploy than larger utility-scale batteries. Copper is now beginning to work with some large manufacturers to design other types of appliances, like heat pumps, that can also add more energy storage to the grid. [Photo: Copper Home] The range is expensive, at around $6,000. But because of the energy and climate benefits, a number of states provide generous incentives. In California, for example, if a homeowner with a gas stove replaces it with Coppers stove, and if the stove was the last gas appliance in the home, they can get a rebate that will cover the entire cost. Some of the first customers include large apartment buildings that want to make the switch away from gas. The New York City Housing Authority is an early adopter, recognizing that the stoves are a way to avoid expensive upgrades to its aging gas infrastructure, to comply with local emission laws, and to improve air quality for residents. It’s a rare case of premium tech scaling up from multiple directions, adopted as much for infrastructure pragmatism as for performance. Whether it’s for public housing or a high-end kitchen, the pitch is the same: cleaner air, better performance, and a new way to support the strained electric grid.
Category:
E-Commerce
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