One design I found really lovely is Andrea, an air purifier that uses a plant to clean the air, created by Mathieu Lehanneur and David Edwards. I love this design for many reasons. The most intuitive and simple reason is that it looks nice and cute. A green plant inside a half transparent half white box just looks clean and neat, which is just consistent with its function, to clean the air. The second reason is for its dual function. It is both an air purifier and an indoor green plant. Andrea combines two different items in the household into a very harmony one. So that it gives beauty to air purifier and gives concrete function to a green plant. The third and the most invoking reason is the design of combining these two together. It is known to all that trees and plants are the most original, and most important purifier for earth. But in households, we usually see machines using electricity to purifier air. Andrea brings the important function of plants back to people’s attention in this way. To me, this design also seems a little bit irony towards the heavy machinery in our world. We build machines for everything but neglecting that the natural have evolved many lives and patterns to fulfill the needs. Therefore, for me, I do think this design is beautiful, useful, and invoke us to think about the natural, machines, and their relationship.
Reference
Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, 2014.
Sarah Housley |14 September 2009 23 comments (2022) Andrea by Mathieu Lehanneur and David Edwards, Dezeen.Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2009/09/14/andrea-by-mathieu-lehanneur-brand-david-edwards/ (Accessed: November 6, 2022).