Spotted: It’s estimated that up to 50 per cent of all plastic produced every year is single-use, meaning it’s only needed for a few moments before being thrown away. In a bid to cut that figure, in 2021 the EU implemented a ban on various single-use plastics, including cutlery. This ban has since created a big gap in the market for sustainable, disposable cutlery. French startup Koovee is working to fill that gap.
Koovee has developed edible cutlery designed to replace all types of single-use plastic utensils. The edible forks and spoons are made from a mix of flour, rapeseed oil, salt, and natural flavours, and have the taste and texture of crackers. Customers can purchase various flavours of the cutlery: natural, almond, and Herbs de Provence. To improve the sustainability of the cutlery further, Marseille-based Koovee also sources its flour from French wheat.
The edible utensils can last more than five minutes when completely submerged in 70 degrees Celsius water, so can be used for soup and other hot foods. Koovee was developed by ecologist and Sciences Po graduate Tiphaine Guerout, who told Springwise that the utensils are “organic, yummy, and sturdy enough for any type of meal.”
The cutlery was developed with the help of financing provided by the French Bank of Public Investment (Bpifrance) and the company also raised €500,000 in an angel round of funding in 2022. Koovee currently produces more than 7,000 pieces of cutlery a day and has a number of commercial customers. Guerout told Springwise that the company hopes to scale in Europe to provide Koovee to “every restaurant and supermarket.”
A number of other recent innovations spotted by Springwise are also working to eliminate single-use plastic, including packaging made from milk proteins and sustainable straws made from sedge grass.
Interior design must begin facing up to uncomfortable truths about our planet and health in 2024, Michelle Ogundehin writes in her annual trends report for Dezeen.
This must be the year of truth. It’s no time to be distracted by talk of trends, new or latest looks. The tactic of holding facts at arm’s length has only enabled denial, obfuscation, and fakery, as well as cauterising our moral obligation to change. Mark Twain aptly summarises our current malaise with the pithy: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Thankfully, the zeitgeist is shifting. We see it in current TV programming, ever a prescient reflection of public mood. Consider Channel 4’s punchy The Great Climate Fight, which volubly charges the British government with incompetence, to ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, dramatising the scandalous lies behind a huge miscarriage of justice.
It’s no time to be distracted by talk of trends, new or latest looks
The desire for unvarnished veracity is there in Netflix’s new tranche of documentaries. Think Robbie Williams: Behind the Scenes and its Jeffrey Epstein exposé. Even Disney’s Wagatha Christie vehicle was about truth-telling.
It reflects the shattering of any persistent facade that everything’s just fine. In the face of extreme weather patterns – from tornados in Manchester in the north of England to record-breaking monsoons in Pakistan – and the escalating rates of chronic disease, anxiety, depression, loneliness epidemics, and other mental-health disorders seen worldwide, surely, finally, our eyes are opening?
In case not, here are a couple of truths that we may need to be reminded of.
One: the perpetual quest for economic growth is unsustainable on a finite planet, yet it prevails because we’ve been hoodwinked into believing that better always means newer, faster, or more. We are entreated to consume for the good of the economy – the work-to-spend cycle. The implication being that if we don’t, we’re responsible for mass unemployment and the failure of honest businesses.
Ergo, consumer-driven economies are routinely prioritised over basic citizen welfare, and material goods have become proxies for our dreams and aspirations, even our expressions of love.
Two: the environments in which we live are increasingly toxic – physically, socially, and mentally. Yet we’re reneging on personal responsibility for our wellbeing with the misguided assumption that big industry would never create products dangerous to human health, and that our healthcare providers are there to patch us up if they do. We need to focus on causes and prevention instead of lucrative (but futile) searches for cures for diseases like cancer.
It wasn’t so long ago that the desire to exercise, seek wellbeing, or be social were reasons to leave the home
What’s tricky is that potential solutions to the above don’t wash well with legislators or many politicians because they appear slow, unduly restrictive, difficult, or inconvenient. Immediate results (i.e. within a single term of office) are seldom forthcoming, thus a stance of head-in-the-sand, or a default to fast fixes, becomes entrenched as the go-to action.
And yet, research suggests that we, the people, feel differently. According to the 10th annual Life at Home report produced this year by IKEA (one of the world’s largest home surveys, encompassing the views of 37,428 people aged 18-plus across 38 countries), searches for “slow living” have doubled since 2015.
So where does this leave us?
We’re being pushed and pulled in many contradictory directions. It wasn’t so long ago that the desire to exercise, seek wellbeing, or be social were reasons to leave the home. Now these activities all happen within the same four walls.
This creates many tensions. Should our domestic caves be linked to the world via the latest high-tech gizmos, or be our deliberate respite from the techno-frazzle? How do we square a wish for personal privacy with the sensation of living in more open spaces? Can we work from home without feeling like we live at work?
It was no surprise to me that Squishmallows were the hit toy of 2023. These soft, malleable cute-character cushions are acutely comforting to hold. Even the revered investor Warren Buffet now has the company in his portfolio. They are a potent symbol of a need.
In response, the popular press touts voluminous La-Z-Boy-style recliners as the next big thing, but is an inducement to lounge ever further into denial really what’s called for?
Our ability to thrive must become the guiding principle for all design
Humans are the ultimate adaptors, but we require stimulus to learn and grow, if not an element of discomfort. While your genes may load the gun, your environment pulls the trigger. Currently, for many, that’s somewhere hyperconnected yet also physically disconnected, temperature-controlled and sedentary.
Align this with the current cult of convenience – that which enhances personal comfort or advantage over everything else, and therein lies the downward spiral.
We must abandon the ordered, rational, learned good taste and comfort that we’ve become used to in favour of something more instinctive and rugged. Less a singular design aesthetic than a profoundly sensory desire to touch, smell and feel intensely. It is the personal over the predictable. The umami in the dish. The idea that owes its genus to a singular moment of unique creative vision, or innovation.
We must aim for a societal stability that does not rely on the continuous fetishisation of “novelty” to drive ever-increasing consumption if economic activity is to have a hope of remaining within ecological scale. Our ability to thrive must become the guiding principle for all design, if not perceptions of success.
Most importantly, we can no longer be afraid to speak or hear these truths, starting at home – the environment over which we have the most agency.
Here, then, are some final “home” truths that bear repeating.
In summary, we have been living in a time of fantastical storytelling, fictions of delusional positivity that obscure the truth. Plato considered that truth is a correspondence between belief and reality. Time to wake up then if we are to stand a chance of survival, as our current reality almost beggars belief.
Michelle Ogundehin is a thought leader on interiors, trends, style and wellbeing. Originally trained as an architect and the former editor-in-chief of ELLE Decoration UK, she is the head judge on the BBC’s Interior Design Masters, and the author of Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness, a guide to living well. She is also a regular contributor to publications including Vogue Living, FT How to Spend It magazine and Dezeen.
The photo, of a Kyiv apartment designed by Olga Fradina, is by Yevhenii Avramenko.
Dezeen In Depth If you enjoy reading Dezeen’s interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.
Spotted: While statistics illustrate that a majority of US consumers still consider it morally acceptable to wear fur, there has been a notable shift away from its use in the fashion industry. Prada, Phillip Lim, Macy’s, Chanel, Burberry, and Net-a-Porter Group have all removed real animal fur from production and sales floors.
Today, vegan alternatives are available, but many fur substitutes are made from petroleum-based synthetic fibres, which are unsustainable, even if they are animal-free. Now, New York and Paris-based bio-materials startup, BioFluff has pioneered a luxury collection based around its plant-based alternative to fur.
The collection, dubbed Savian, featured artificial fur crafted from natural plant fibres using proprietary methods. The line includes fur, shearling, and fleece-like fabrics that are vegan, GMO-free, and incorporate natural- and mineral-based dyes. The materials both look and feel natural.
Savian is the first materials brand created by BioFluff, which recently secured $2.5 million (around €2.3 million) in a seed round led by Astanor Ventures, a leading name in agrifood tech impact investing. This follows a 2022 pre-seed round that raised $500,000 (around €457,000). The company aims to expand into developing plant-based interior designs, packaging, and even toys.
Plant-based materials are slowly replacing petroleum-based products in many areas. Recent innovations spotted by Springwise include clothing made from seaweed and all-natural sneakers.
A recent University of Cambridge study that cast doubt on the long-term effectiveness of insulating UK homes is not as bad news as it first appears, argues Insulate Britain campaigner James Thomas.
On 20 January, Dezeen reported on an academic paper by Cambridge University researchers looking at the long-term effects of energy-efficiency retrofits in the UK. At first glance, the Dezeen story and/or the paper might seem “anti-retrofit”. I want to bring a counterpoint to that knee-jerk reaction.
Bad news is still good information. Information in the form of empirical primary research by qualified professionals with track records in the relevant field, backed up by well-established research institutions, peer-reviewed and published in a respected academic journal – with all parties having a strong incentive not to get caught out doing bad work – is better than most.
At first glance, the Dezeen story and/or the paper might seem “anti-retrofit”
So when such a source presents information that, at first glance, seems to be at odds with what we want to hear, or what we were expecting to hear, we should take a calm moment and listen anyway; we might learn something.
The study is one of the first to use a large dataset (55,154 homes) looking at the impact of real-world retrofits in the long term. The clickbait conclusion is: empirical data shows that energy savings from retrofitting disappear after about four years.
Although the data is new, this finding is not unexpected. Economic theory predicts a “rebound effect” in energy usage following retrofits. A retrofit amounts to a reduction in the (financial) cost of warming your home – so you might well find yourself keeping your home warmer after your retrofit than before it.
Another not-unexpected finding from the paper is that retrofits have a significantly lower impact on energy consumption in homes in deprived areas, which are suffering from fuel poverty. We can assume that households in this category, pre-retrofit, were already spending up to the limit of what they could afford on heating, and that this was insufficient to keep their homes at a comfortable temperature.
After a retrofit, the same level of expenditure on energy would be enough to make such a home comfortable. So the energy usage would stay about the same – but the lives of the people living in that home would be vastly improved.
Two other significant factors contributing to the worse-than-predicted performance of retrofits, not discussed at length in the Cambridge paper, are the variance between buildings and quality control issues in retrofit installation and design.
Poor design or slapdash installation can entirely negate the performance benefits of an expensive retrofit
Different types of houses require different retrofit solutions, as might different houses of the same type. Poor design or slapdash installation can entirely negate the performance benefits of an expensive retrofit. Both of these factors point at the same thing: the need for consistent and reliably high quality in the design of retrofits and their installation.
But what stood out for me most from the Cambridge study, and from everything else I know about retrofitting, is the need for something much better than a retrofit-and-forget programme. A whole-house retrofit transforms your home from a passive pile of bricks and timber into something more like a machine, integrating multiple interacting passive and active systems.
You need to know not to throw open your windows when you’re surprised by how warm it is. Your retrofitted house is a machine; you need to learn how to drive it. You might even need to take a driving test.
The study authors say it their way: “Our results call for the urgent need to fully incorporate human behaviour into ex-ante modelling of energy use and to complement financial and regulatory energy efficiency policy instruments with soft instruments to promote the behavioural changes needed to realise the full saving potential of the adoption of energy efficiency improvements.”
In short, the rebound effect, and other effects identified by the Cambridge study, can be compensated for if the retrofits are delivered via the vehicle of an intelligent, progressive, integrated national policy. Such a programme would include comprehensive training for engineers, installers and end users, monitoring of both installation quality and post-installation usage, and refresher training where necessary.
Another possible tool, dare I mention it, could be rewards and/or penalties to incentivise sensible use by residents post-retrofit. Controversial, but it exists in many other areas of life where one person’s behaviour could have a negative impact on others. Nobody freaks out about the fact we have driving tests and driving licences – as well as fines for bad driving.
Nobody, least of all Insulate Britain, ever said national-scale retrofitting would be easy or cheap
That’s why Insulate Britain calls for something akin to the NHS for retrofitting: a National Insulation Service. Such an institution could provide other crucial benefits like trust and a service ethos, consistency across geography and time, data-sharing on what works and what doesn’t.
To free-market diehards that baulk at the notion of the less-than-optimal commercial efficiency that could come with delivering retrofits via a large state service effort, consider how we don’t marketise core state services like healthcare, education, defence. Aren’t providing energy security, eliminating fuel poverty and avoiding climate death also core?
Thanks to the Cambridge study, we now know for certain that a retrofit-and-forget approach won’t make the energy savings from retrofits stick. The Royal Institute of British Architects, and the Construction Leadership Council, and the Architects Climate Action Network have all called for a comprehensive national retrofit strategy. The report academics say it their way, Insulate Britain say it our way.
Nobody, least of all Insulate Britain, ever said national-scale retrofitting would be easy or cheap. But it’s still easier and cheaper than any other carbon mitigation intervention – if it is delivered in the form of an intelligent, progressive, integrated national policy to include not just money, but also action to support trust, quality control and behaviour change.
James Thomas is a British architect, environmental economist and campaigner. He led the team that designed Extinction Rebellion’s pink boat Berta Cáceres and spent two months in jail for blocking the M25 motorway outside London as part of an Insulate Britain protest calling for a national retrofit scheme.
Spotted: When most people think of virtual reality (VR), they think of entertainment. But Dutch startup Enliven has a different idea. The company is using VR to create a more understanding and empathetic society. Started by Iranian refugee Alex Tavassoli, who arrived in the Netherlands as a young child, the company is developing VR tech that allows users to see and feel the world from the point of view of those experiencing bullying, discrimination, inequality, and sexual harassment.
Enliven has developed software to run on VR headsets, such as the Oculus Quest. Enliven only sells the software, but does work closely with hardware manufacturers and distributors. The target audience for its platform is companies conducting employee training sessions, but the company has also developed software on the themes of domestic violence and mild mental disability together with the Dutch Ministry of Justice and the Dutch Probabation Service.
According to Enliven, the approach of putting oneself into the virtual shoes of those experiencing crisis has been demonstrated to increase awareness of the emotional and mental impact of destructive behaviour. It claims the experience also improves the chances that users will recognise and adapt their own behaviour.
In addition to providing software, Enliven provides companies with training in how to use it and can also develop bespoke VR to address specific situations. Tavassoli is clear, however, that his biggest motivation is to increase compassion, saying that, “every time someone experiences our content, they are exponentially more likely to act against domestic violence, bullying, or discrimination.”
At Springwise, we have seen VR used in a number of innovative ways, including to test cognitive skills and in the treatment of phobias. This is the first application we have seen that aims to increase empathy and compassion. However, Enliven is keen to point out that the platform is no panacea, saying, “The VR simulation must always be part of a training or course. After the virtual reality experience made its impact, it is up to you as trainer or teacher to turn this into effective (behavioural) change.”
Between 2000 and 2019, global life expectancy increased by more than six years. And over the long term, average life expectancy has increased from less than 30 in 1770 to over 70 in 2019. Simply put, people are living long than ever – a testament to the exponential gains in medical knowledge that have accompanied our modern age.
But while the overall story of global healthcare is a positive one, the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us not to be complacent. Aside from the immediate impact of the crisis, huge disparities remain between different healthcare systems, and the pandemic has highlighted varying levels of resilience and preparedness. Moreover, the toll of endemic infectious disease remains high in some regions. In 2020, 1.5 million people died from tuberculosis, 680,000 from AIDS-related illnesses, and 627,000 from malaria. And, while people are living longer, increases in the number of years a person can expect to live in good health have not kept pace with overall life expectancy.
Global health and wellbeing challenges therefore remain, and innovation will play an important role in tackling them – from artificial intelligence that streamlines diagnosis to clothing that helps to prevent malaria.
Health and AI
One major frontier of medical innovation is artificial intelligence (AI). The AI in healthcare market is forecast to reach $64.1 billion (around €59 billion) by 2027. AI is scaling up and automating tasks that could previously be completed only by human health professionals – freeing up the time of doctors and nurses, while helping to reduce human error. For example, a network of 11 medical facilities in Chicago, is trialling an AI system that flags and follows-up on signs in medical images of illnesses beyond those that were the subject of the original referral.
With AI applications growing in number, there is strong demand for large amounts of patient data to test and train algorithms. One startup is on a mission to provide the data needed for validation studies that test the effectiveness of AI healthcare applications – without compromising patient privacy.
Mental Health
Recent decades have seen growing understanding of the importance of mental health. According to the World Health Organizatio(WHO), around 20 per cent of the world’s children and adolescents have a mental health condition. The seriousness of mental health is enshrined in target 3.4 within SDG 3 – which calls for the promotion of mental health and well-being. Innovation is helping to improve access to mental health services. For example, one app uses AI to provide clinically proven mental health therapy. The platform offers affordable psychological support regardless of location and time.
Given the prevalence of mental health conditions among children, innovators are focusing on solutions tailored to the needs of families. For example, another mental health app helps families have difficult conversations using a framework based on empirical, evidence-based research and insights.
Health coverage and access to medicines
According to the United Nations, less than half of the global population is covered by essential health services. And 2 billion people still lack access to medicines. Target 3.8 within SDG 3 sets the task of achieving universal health coverage, encompassing financial risk protection and access to services, medicines, and vaccines. Here innovation can help. For example, one Nigerian startup is aiming to make healthcare accessible and affordable in low- and middle-income countries. The company does this by bundling together several healthcare services—including insurance plans, telemedicine, and prescription delivery—under a single flat fee. Another, related issue is the prevalence of fake pharmaceuticals. An online marketplace combats this problem with a platform that connects patients with trusted, vetted suppliers.
Contagious disease
Much progress has been made in tackling contagious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. For example, over 6.2 million malaria deaths were averted between 2000 and 2015. Nonetheless, , according to the WHO, there were 241 million malaria cases in 2021. One startup is making bamboo sleepwear with insect repellent incorporated into the fabric. This helps to prevent mosquito bites that transmit malaria-causing parasites.
Tuberculosis (TB) is another disease that remains deadly. In 2020, an estimated 9.9 million people fell ill with TB. To enable TB diagnosis in remote regions, a Mexican biotechnology startup has developed an affordable diagnostic system that requires no electricity, costs less than €1 per test, and returns results in 15 minutes.
Reproductive health
According to the WHO, every day in 2017, approximately 810 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Of these deaths, 94 per cent were in low- and lower-middle-income countries. A key cause of maternal death is a lack of medical expertise, with over 55 per cent of countries having fewer than 40 nursing and midwifery professionals per 10,000 people. However, innovation can still play a role in improving reproductive health. For example, a new blood test—which can be taken around the sixth month of pregnancy—could signal the likelihood of a premature birth.
Words: Matthew Hempstead
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