Dutch designer Bauke Knottnerus presents a unique joining of art and furniture in his new work Phat Knits. At first glance it appears to be designed as furniture for seating, but upon further inspection you can see its resemblance to oversized knitted pieces.

The intent was to shape textiles through the use of PVC needles as part of a material design. It has been lauded by observers as furniture in some cases and others asdecorative art.

When you live in the city, it’s easy to lose touch of some of mother nature’s simple offerings like a breeze or wild plant life. Keeping in mind how these things can inspire appreciation of nature, the designers at Pensa created this unique lighting solution that mimics the shape and sway of water reeds.

Powered by the water’s current, the Light Reeds provide a subtle, romantic glow to public areas while offering a deeper connection to the waterfront.

WM Series furniture are designe by New Zealand designer Tim Webber. The furnitures are made of metal and wood. The “WM series” can be described as a clean, stripped back aesthetic, with the simplicity of the forms and mixture of materials creating bold, striking items.

The works are an exploration of the relationship between some of the two most common materials used in furniture design – wood and metal. The idea was to see how they can contrast yet complement each other in a single piece of furniture or lighting.

Both materials hold quite different emotional responses that have been developed over time through people’s personal experiences with various objects. Wood typically holds a very warm, rich, natural feel, while steel is often described as cold, hard and unforgiving. However, when these two materials are mated together there seems be a harmony that forms in the juxtaposition of these two very different materials.

Metal components of the furniture and lighting have been finished in vibrant powdercoat colours, which I think enhances this contrast between the wood and metal, all while creating approachable objects that have the ability to inject striking colour and warmth into any environment.

The powdercoat finish is also a nice exploration aesthetically due to the almost plastic type look it gives the steel, which somewhat alters the metals’ characteristics. It’s not until the item is personally touched and held that it becomes clear the metal still holds its typical traits.

Plant-in City is an art installation, developed by a collaboration of NY architects, designers, and developers. The handsome terrariums made of cedar frames, copper pipes for water, digital sensors, and integrated lighting bring picturesque gardens into your home or office. The Plant-in collaboration contains the sense of park in your private space, the lighting and boxed frames lend themselves to punctuating the vitality of living plants, much like a still life. The boxes are equal parts art, science experiment, and high design. Huy Bui of HB Collaborative says that he and his partners, Med44, in the Plant-in City project spend a lot of time indoors surrounded by technology and hardware and were “looking for an opposing force to balance all of that and considered creating a living wall.”

The wooden blocks are based off a grid with one-, two-, and four-foot increments. The idea is that the blocks can be stacked to create walls or used as individual pieces of art. The basic design of it can be implemented outdoors on a large scale as well as within a living room. Carlos Gomez de Llarena, a media architect from Med44, says that Plant-it City was inspired by the Internet of Things as well as Archigram’s Plug-in City, where mega structures of capsules for living could be grown on demand. The Plant-it project’s namesake is in honor of this concept. He says, “our project makes it possible to have a miniature Highline Park in a loft.” That is, distilling the diverse qualities of a park in capsule form.

The Plant-in City is in the prototype stage with Bui and collaborators raising seed money with a Kickstarter campaign. The simple stacking frames have huge potential for urban dwellers. Imagine the MoMA or a gallery space being filled with the boxes, a loft patio space lined by them, or home chefs growing their favorite herbs, the possibilities are endless. Much like the creative visions of Olmstead centuries ago, NYC architects and designers are coming together to create beautiful and clever solutions for green living and can be used by the population at-large. Gomez de Llarena says, “We want to build bionic plant furnishings for the information age.”

365 is stitching the time as it passes by. It is knitting 24 hours a day and one year at the time, showing the physical representation of time as a creative and tangible force. After 365 days the clock has turned the passed year into a 2-m long scarf. Now the past can be carried out in the future and the upcoming year is hiding in a new spool of thread, still unknitted.

Sasa is both a necklace and a clock. The time is read from wooden beads placed over a slowly turning carousel. As the carousel rotates, a bead slips down the cord every 5 minutes. The last bead to have dropped indicates the time.

The beads on the necklace are colour coded to indicate minutes, hours, and 12:00. To tell the time, simply find the gold or silver 12:00 bead that has most recently slipped down the cord. From that point count the number of “hour” beads to find the hour and then the “minute” beads by fives. In the image here the time is 2:25pm. The 24 hour version indicates noon with a gold bead and midnight with a silver bead. The 12 hour necklace indicates noon and midnight with the same bead.

The Sasa clock is available in 12 hour and 24 hour necklace versions.

“Sasa”, in the African Kiswahili language, means “What is now”. The producer Daniel Estes says,

“The Sasa Clock™ encourages us to relax and let time flow. It offers us organic time as opposed to atomic time. The ceaseless march of time, measurable in endlessly smaller increments, is a western concept. In many parts of the world, time is not parsed into seconds or even minutes. In some places, people perceive time as speeding up when activities speed up and slowing down when its time to rest. They control time rather than it controlling them.”

We need to slow down and relax sometimes. Sometimes to roughly know the time is better than exactly knowing the time. In fact, sometimes we need to completely liberate ourselves from the clock. In these cases, simply remove the beads from the carousel and wear them as a necklace.

In today’s Western society, digital communication, networking and the Web 2.0 are parts of our daily life. The constant ‘real time’ connection is changing us, our environment and the perception of it.

On the threshold of the post-digital society the limits of space and time are abolished. The physical dematerialization is a true consequence. The Bauhaus industrial product has become obsolete. Hybrid objects are becoming media, surfaces transform into spaces and spaces turn into unsharp gradients.

In an accelerated era full of freedom of forms and the change as a status quo I am creating an object which itself has no definite state and which is capable of interacting with the user and his environment.

“www” is an interpretation of the ‘shelf’ archetype. Between form and function, between space and dimension, between a not-yet and a not-anymore it creates concrete opportunities and specific associations. Through its parts it is not only a modular system, but also a type of installation in an ever changing space.

The Fossile Bookcase from Roche Bobois is a group of egg-shaped modules with grooves around the outside similar to what you would find on a gear. Those notches allow them to stack and stay in place, forming a bookshelf.

Part sculpture, part useful furniture, the shelves are made from terracotta and crafted in France.

The curved units can go indoors or outdoors, be filled with books or art in your living room, or stuffed with towels in your bathroom or by the pool. If you’re feeling really crazy, turn a few on their sides, put a sheet of glass on top and call it a table.

They are not exactly golden eggs, but the shelves do come in terracotta’s natural hue of brownish-orange or ash-brown.