Feb 17 Steelcase Goes DIY With Ecovative Home-Grown Packaging (It's Edible, Too)

Next time a company brags about their sustainable packaging, ask why they aren't growing it themselves. Steelcase, a Michigan-based office furniture company, is doing exactly that as part of a partnership with packaging startup Ecovative.

The plant-based packaging foam, set to roll out this month on Steelcase's Currency line, is made up of agricultural byproducts (seed husks, cotton burrs) and bound together naturally with mushroom roots. "It has the consistency of a rice cake with a brie exterior," explains Angela Nahikian, Steelcase's director of global environmental sustainability. "Any woody, agricultural byproduct can be used as food for the mushroom root material." You could even eat the Styrofoam-like packaging--but it probably wouldn't be very tasty.

The packaging grows in ambient temperatures and requires zero energy until a drying process at the end. And perhaps most importantly, the compostable material is comparable in cost to traditional packaging.

Steelcase eventually hopes to produce the packaging regionally, with different agricultural byproducts used depending on what is available in the area. "There are piles of cottonseed hulls in the South, and they're often expensive for farmers to get rid of," Nahikian says. Instead, those hulls might be used to make packaging for, say, an office chair.

Next up for Steelcase: bringing Ecovative's EcoCradle packaging to more product lines. The ultimate goal, explains Nahikian, is to go through Steelcase's portfolio and eliminate synthetics wherever possible.

Feb 7 IDEO and Steelcase Unveil a School Desk for the Future of Teaching

[Update: James Ludwig, Steelcase's chief designer, has sent us some intriguing information on pricing and demand, added to the bottom of this post]

IDEO and Steelcase have just announced what might be a revolution in classroom design, a school desk that seamlessly adapts to whatever happens in class.

If you've spent any time in a schoolroom in the last 15 years, you're familiar with the high pitched whine of metal scraping against linoleum, as students rearrange their chairs and desks to whatever activity is going on. It seems like a minor annoyance, but it's a serious design problem: School furniture was largely designed 50 years ago for static, face-forward teaching. It isn't suited to the myriad forms of teaching that take place in the modern classroom.

Contrast that with the Node chair, which was designed by IDEO and produced by Steelcase, a Michigan-based furniture company. The details betray a remarkable thoughtfulness: The seat is a generously sized bucket, so that students can shift around and adapt their posture to whatever's going on; the seat also swivels, so that students can, for example, swing around to look at other students making class presentations; and a rolling base allows the chair to move quickly between lecture-based seating and group activities.

In group activities, the proportions are such that the chairs and integrated desktops combine into something like a conference table:

And finally, there's storage underneath the seat--but off the ground--for backpacks, while the armrests themselves have a subtle flair that allows them to become strong, convenient hooks:

Of course, it's unlikely that the chair will be appearing in your local public school anytime soon--the market seems to be the glizty new secondary schools and new university classrooms popping into existence. And you wonder whether the economics will work out, since a plastic chair probably can't last as long as bomb-proof metal job like you find in public schools.

Meaning this design, for now, will be one more reason to envy a private-school education.

For more pictures, check out The Contemporist.

UPDATE

James Ludwig, Steelcase's VP of global design, writes that the chair is $599 fully loaded with a desktop, and $399 without. Ludwig also says that he's gotten lots of confirmation from educators that the price point makes it viable in the market--and that already, there have been verbal commitments from university clients around the world.