The Future Home: Innovative Design for Human and Plant Cohabitation: Sustainable Air Filtration Terrarium

Statement

We are a design lab based in Joshua Tree, California. Our purpose is to:
1) Look at plants as technology but from a human and creative perspective
2) Pursue the potential many plant species have for removing toxins and adding moisture to the breathing zones in our homes, offices, clinical spaces, and commercial spaces.
3) Encourage the co-habitation of plants and humans.
4) Increase the appeal of incorporating plants into our living spaces by applying good, sustainable design principles to existing methods of keeping houseplants.
5) Personalize the breathing zones of individuals based on their environmental health concerns such as benzene or formaldehyde exposure.
6) Re-imagine the kitchen’s tea cupboard and spice rack as a living resource.
7) Re-imagine the bathroom’s medicine cabinet as a living resource offering safer, lasting, fresher, and more holistic alternatives to many of the commercial items that are conventionally stocked in medicine cabinets at home.
8) Critically engage the ways in which plants can be used for aesthetic purposes in interior design.

In this pursuit we are currently developing the following design lines:
“Sustainable Air Filtration”
“Sustainable Humidity Maintenance”
“Living Medical Resource”
“Living Kitchen Resource”
“Built-In and Mobile Terrarium Installations”
“Interior Desert-scaping”

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Sustainable Air Filtration Terrarium

The “sustainable air filtration” terrarium line uses plants chosen specifically for their ability to remove airborne toxins and emit pure, clean, bio-remediated air. The government agency NASA has conducted studies on this process to determine if detoxifying plants would be beneficial in space missions. Bill Wolverton, who was one of the scientists who conducted these studies, summarizes the results in his book How to Grow Fresh Air. The terrarium design we are developing utilizes many of the plants involved in those studies, maximizes these properties, minimizes the care and maintenance of these plants, and produces fresh air. The plants that are most efficient at removing airborne toxic chemicals are often also most efficient at transpiring moisture out of their leaves and stems, thus adding humidity to the air that is emitted from the terrarium unit. The “sustainable humidity maintenance” terrarium prototype was inspired by the extremely dry climate of Joshua Tree, CA.
These units take the place of noisy, costly, and polluting commercial air purifiers while providing many of the other benefits that come with cohabitating with plants. Several of our prototypes have custom fans and simple, controllable output valves so that the user can control the volume of air that is filtered by the terrarium. We are looking into methods of powering these vans with photovoltaic solar panels. Other prototypes have a simple lid that can be opened to expel fresh, humid air, and then closed again while the terrarium produces more clean air. These units have the potential to be used to combat asthma especially in urban areas where indoor air pollution is the greatest contributor to childhood asthma. They can be used to reduce exposure to these toxins which can lead to other major illnesses such as cancer and multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome. We are looking into any means of conducting small and large scale sociological and scientific experiments to examine the affects of the terrariums on users with and without such illnesses.