Lapka is a collection of smart sensors which plug into your iphone and give you a visual representation of your envrionment. Initially released during CES the consumer electronics show in las Vegas earlier this year, it is now being showcased with its delicious minimalist and emotive packaging that fits entirely with the wood detailing on the product itself.

This beautiful range of packaging for athletes has caught our collective eye at Future-Filter. The successful blend of pastel colours, minimalist geometric illustration and sans serif type almost makes us want to take up running!

There are a lot of designers, architects and restaurants that are going back to nature and exploring nature in new ways, but taking a really fresh approach to nature, sustainability and design is Moe Nagata who is soon to graduate from the Textiles Futures Ma. Her project was inspired by ancient tribal based craft design that was rooted in animism and a symbiotic relationship with nature. Traditional tribes hunted for food and then used every last piece of the animal to make products such as teeth necklaces.

Nagata has taken that consideration into a very modern look with her From Creatures collection that uses the natural materials discarded from the fishing industry. Using shells and bones she has given them a surprising twist using laser cutting, dyeing and printing.

Just opened in Paris is the Envie/Alive exhibition curated by Carole Collet which explores issues around synthetic biology. The exhibition begins with a statement  'A quiet revolution is happening. A new breed of designer has begun to reshape our world by re-orchestrating our relationship to nature'. Most of the work is not new, but it is for the first time that it is all under one roof.

Showing the likes of Emile de Vischer's pearling and Amy Congdon's biological atelier it also explores the work of architects and designers who are exploring the bio-engineered world.

Presenting a new design landscape with a glimpse to our synthetic future and a new ecological consideration the exhibition groups them under 5 headings

1/ The Plagiarists: (Nature as a model) those who look to nature to engineer man made and digital solutions.

2/ The New Artisans: (Nature as a co-worker) - those designers who are collaborating with nature to craft future consumer goods

3/ The Bio-Hackers: (Reprogrammed, ‘synthetic’ nature) designers working with synthetic biologists and who are engineering living organisms for a possible hybrid future

4/ The New Alchemists: (Hybridised nature) combining biological and chemical (non living) technology these designers merge robotics, chemistry and biology

5/ The Agents Provocateurs: (Conceptualised and imagined nature.) Pushing the boundaries to the extreme these designers explore the ethics around living technology as well as high-tech sustainability.

Alongside the exhibition ‘En Vie-Alive’ is hosting 4 designers and architects who are already working with synthetic biology or tissue engineering and has them set up in a lab style scenario showing the new tool kit for designers of the future - DNA and bacteria.

Soon to be graduating from Central St Martins, Textile Futures Course, Amy Radcliffe has designed an analogue device that  captures scents that can later be retrieved to exist as an olfactory memory of a time and a place. Questioning 'How can we archive personal memories through captured scent?' Amy is drawing parallels to the way that we consumed our memories through photography in a pre digital era drawing comparisons with lomography and 35mm film. Photographs were precious and faded with time.

Utilising the Headspace Technology to capture 'scents' Amy's project explores the poetic narrative of the time it takes to capture the scent and considers how in the future we will 're-experience the moment' through the emotions that a scent captures.

Her device is beautifully crafted using ceramics, leather and blown glass - all skills that she has acquired during the project to enable her to develop a sensitively designed analogue system that would allow us to capture scents - one that could in turn profoundly change the way we experience scents in our daily life engaging with our memories in an entirely new way.

Titled 'Madeleine' Amy makes reference to Proust and his works 'In search of lost time' where explores he the experience of 'Involuntary Memory' - one that Amy believes her device will elicit.

The other material of choice during Milan was glass. It was in abundance and especially exploring colour and texture. One designer who particularly stuck out was Ammy Olofsson who explores the notion of the intangible with the tangible through her designs. Looking to the idea of mirages and rainbows - from a scientific perspective we know they are real, but at the same time they are not real in a tangible sense.

Ammy tries to explore this same feeling with form, colour and luminosity with her blown glass pieces.

Acting as an alchemist she plays with space, mirror, light and form and the resulting glass pieces are beautiful yet intangible at the same time.

The jury is still out as to whether Milan was a great, or not so great year - I feel a bit disappointed overall but amongst some really bad design - Zona Tortona being particularly poor - there were some fantastic finds. One of the key materials that stuck out during the show was the abundance of marble and stone.

What was particularly beautiful about it was the blend between the rawness and beauty of nature that the material offers, combined with modern day tooling allowing for beautifully refined objects.

The marble bath that was on show as part of the Hybrids Architecture show at the University was particularly incredible as was the installation from Mathieu Lehanneur for the Bathing in Light marble installation at Superstudio

In contrast the combination of the organic exuberance of the glass captured within the refined marble structures at Osmosi by Emmanuel Babled in Lambrate were breathtaking in both scale, colour and proportion whilst the incredible curved marble sculptures at Wallpaper Handmade Milan by Michael Anastassiades and Henraux exemplified the beauty of when man and machine come together in design.

With the build up to Milan next week there are a plethora of exciting and some not so exciting projects that are being exposed to tantalise the design industry to visit during their time in Milan. Tom Dixon's MOST currently offering Robots and Design looks set to fully take over from the lure of Lambrate and one of those designers who will be making waves showing at MOST is Emilie Grenier a graduating student from the Textile Futures Ma at CSM.

Her project is not only pertinent, but it is also beautifully executed. Here is a sneak peek at what she will be showing during Milan at MOST next week.

She explains her project so well I have simply lifted the copy (with permission!) from her site.

'Disquiet Luxurians explores alternative trends for the production and consumption of rare and luxurious objects. This has led to a new definition of the current state of luxury, one which (re)places most emphasis on meaning, craft and provenance. The resulting collection focuses on the material feldspar - the world's most prevalent mineral which makes up 60% of the Earth's crust. If we define ourselves by what we achieve with the materials that surround us, then let the times of the Disquiet Luxurians be those of more meaningful value'

Image Credits Tristan Thomson

Craft and artisanal design explorations have been gaining favour for many seasons now and the hand of the maker does not seem to be abating, it is infact even more interestingly evolving with the hand of the machine too and creating entirely new aesthetics. Recognising this and seeing the importance in the 'art of the maker' is the current exhibition Hand Made: long live crafts at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Holland.

Interestingly the exhibition carefully puts at the centre the notion of the hand crafted myth of imperfection and one offs to try to contextualise craft in the modern day.

Showcasing pieces from the middle ages to the modern day they have curated the objects in seven sections: Crafsmanship, Honesty, Art, Tradition, Unicity, Virtuosity and Handicrafts.

Amongst the pieces on show are the modern day Dutch craftspeople such as Iris van Herpen with her digitally crafted garments and Studio Job.

There are also a series of videos accompanying the exhibition that can be viewed here.

Hand Made Long Live Crafts runs until May 20th

Another project exploring the importance of smiling and happiness, the Smile Bot was created as a smile catcher and to encourage people to smile more in the depressed world we live in currently. Designed to be approachable and to elicit a smile, the bot uses sound effects and an interactive smile screen and smile counter. Using facial recognition technology and a smile detection algorithm the bot reacts to peoples smile and changes its own face from a sad blue to a happier colour when capturing real smiles.

When it is at its happiest and when 4 people are smiling simultaneously the 'Ultra-smile Mode' is reached and a rainbow emerges inside the bots belly.

Shown during the Negative Space Exhibition, Stockholm Design Week 2013 Nomad Mirrors by Iina Vuorivirta explores our relationship with our image of ourselvesand the curiosity it raises in us. Playing with angles that reflect things that are not directly in front of them the mirrors offer up ambiguous reflections. The use of polished brass changes the mood of the image so that the mirrors capture in a more poetic way and play with the imagination.

With the desire for Happiness being a key trend we are seeing a plethora of Happiness apps, guidelines on how to make your employees more happy and so on. In this vein we love the "Happiness Brewery" from the Happiness Factory. Described as being like a beer which contains the best parts of your past, the feelings you can no longer have...they try to recreate a personal moment that they then bottle and send to you to capture that fleeting moment of happiness.  

Taking traditional basket weaving as inspiration for a project about imitation and reinterpretation of craft,  Dineke Dekker's Basket project explores textile and artisinal techniques in a beautiful and poetic way. Using imitation bamboo structures as well as silk screening patterns onto textiles to resemble basketry and through the us of custom made paint stamps she has created a visual feast that plays tricks on the eye and comments on traditional craftsmanship in our modern world.

Exploring the possibilities of a material that sits somewhere between a liquid and a magnet, Studio Fraser Ross are pushing the boundaries of our perception of liquid and solid with their newly developed material. Beautiful in a mesmerising way the material can be manipulated by external forces such as gravity and air as demonstrated by their lovely video.  

http://vimeo.com/59835669#at=0

Transnatural are showcasing their latest exhibition titled 'Still Unidentified Objects' which as the name suggests explores unidentified forms of collaboration between man, machine and nature. Showcasing her Emotional Dialogue video, Svenja Jeune questions real and artificial, textile and nature with her communicating textile forms that transform and morph as they detect the emotional mood of the viewer. The well documented Energy Collection from Marjan van Aubel is also shown and fits nicely with the messages from Transnatural to do with harvesting energy from natural sources be it in her case food, or in the case of Trap light, via sun light.

The brilliant Thomas Vailly is also showing his work that explores our mortality and the reality of the waste that we leave behind such as hair whilst the slightly disconcerting living organism dress 'Like living organisms' is a skin dress that expresses excitement and emotion between two people when they first meet.

Open until 1st July at Workspace, Lijnbaansgracht 148a Amsterdam.

http://vimeo.com/43997522#at=0

Published on Nowness as part of their food series, Lucy McRae explores the ideas of gene manipulation and cloning with her Make your Maker film. Exploring notions of edible clones and a new sensory experience she conjures up the idea that food and the body are inseperable - a dialogue she has developed with Nahji Chu the savant owner of Australian cult restaurant MissChu.

An evolution of her film for Aesop titled Morphe Lucy further explores a future landscape through beautiful cinematography, colour and materiality