The Future Home: Innovative Design for Human and Plant Cohabitation: Living Medical Resource 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

Living Medical Resource Terrarium

The “Living Medical Resource” terrarium and open container garden prototypes use plants that have medicinal properties to supplement and potentially replace their pharmaceutical counterparts. Aloe Vera plants are used, for instance, to provide a living, growing, and safer alternative to the packaged burn cream that is normally kept in a medicine cabinet. Having a Living Medical Resource unit as a bathroom companion encourages the use of these healthful and holistic plants on a regular basis.