Design: "Support" - Versatile Furniture
Materials: Old road signs, Steel, Whatever you want.
Designer: Eliott Copier
"The design community must continue to rethink the way it uses material. I designed this project around the material, namely reused road signs. The design includes a clamping system that allows the user to connect various materials to the base."
VOTING IS NOW CLOSED ON THIS ENTRY
"This encourages the user to reuse material instead of throwing it away. This design uses 90% reused material. The sustainability movement is fueled by many small designs that make one massive impact. This design seeks to be part of this movement."
Designer: Eliott Copier
Link: www.behance.net/eliottcopier
Location: Grand Rapids, MI
• Voting is open for four days on each design!
• Follow on Twitter - #ATShowcase
• Submission Form (until Sep. 17)
• About Design Showcase 2010: This summer we're celebrating the best in design for the home. We're taking submissions from independent and student designers from around the world and letting our readers vote on who they think has the best design. There's also a panel of august judges (no pun intended). Two winners will win $20,000 in targeted advertising placements on our sites to help launch their careers. All info is here with SUBMISSION FORM.
100 DIY Ideas for the 3-Day Weekend
Danielle's Charming, Classic Walk-Up
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
White Enamel Flatwa...
How To Cook Fluffy, Tasty Quinoa
Perfect Summer Cocktail Recipe: Honey Bourbon Lemonade
anyone can put materials together to make something new--the trick for a designer is to make it useful and attractive. i don't think that Copier has developed a distinctive aesthetic.
the key to this design is the reused materials which is an important attribute for sustainability in design. sometimes aesthetics must be sacrificed to make a statement
i don't think the floor lamp was the strongest in aesthetics department. maybe the first picture should have been of some other product or the family of the products.
The end product seems to fill its intended function well, but the look on the other hand is not very appealing to me. While I congratulate the designer on taking action regarding repurposing the old, personally I wouldn't like used road signs in my home. Maybe there's some other strong material that could be used the same way though?
The poster might need more space between the lines? I'm a typography noob though, so I may be wrong.
This is a kinda strange solution for a problem that doesn't exist: road signs are made of aluminum and routinely recycled by municipalities and state agencies. There aren't large numbers of old road signs out there.
I love this! I praise Eliott for being an Industrial Designer who is conscious of the world around them. The problem is not recycling road signs, its reduce, reuse, repurpose and recycling in general.
The table even looks good being used as a supply table, in a fairly "non industrial" style room: proving that this is a versatile piece of furniture. This is useful and attractive in my eyes.
It won't let me vote for you!! AT needs to fix this so your score isn't skewed!
I don't think there's much a demand to look like you live in a construction site.
To burst your sustainable bubble, it's ironic the chose of aluminum out of all the other materials to reuse. It's the only resource that consumers can actually make money from recycling because it costs less to reuse it than to create fresh aluminum from scratch. Glass, paper, plastic, the community loses money by recycling these and continues to pollute the air in the reprocessing.
Furthermore, road signs, really? Did you obtain your objects illegally? A single stop sign cost over a hundred dollars to produce, you don't often see these expensive, government owned gems laying around in gutters everywhere