Most furniture sits in a room without saying much. It fills a corner, does its job, and disappears into the background. Nako Baev’s THE OBJECT 01 is not that kind of furniture. The Amsterdam-based designer set out to build a chair that carries the weight of a spatial statement, something that holds its ground without decoration or apology, and in that specific ambition, the object largely delivers.

THE OBJECT 01 is a 3D-printed lounge chair built from recycled PETG, a plastic more commonly found in water bottles than in furniture workshops. At 20kg, it is lighter than its blocky, slab-heavy proportions suggest, though not exactly something you would reposition on a whim. Its dimensions push it closer in scale to a small architectural fragment than to a typical chair, which is likely the whole point.

Designer: Nako Baev

The construction follows a modular panel system, where each 3D-printed block fits into a sequence designed to cut material waste and keep the overall mass structurally lean. Finished in a cold grey Baev calls “Kyoto Fog,” the chair reads somewhere between concrete and matte stone. In a sparse studio or raw loft, it anchors the space with quiet authority. In a more conventional living room, it would likely dominate in ways not every household would welcome.

What makes THE OBJECT 01 genuinely worth attention is how honestly it exposes its own making. The layer-by-layer texture from the printing process is not hidden or smoothed away; it stays visible across the surface, turning the manufacturing method into part of the visual language. That kind of material honesty is far more common in ceramics or cast concrete than in plastic furniture, and it gives the piece a tactile quality that polished renders simply do not convey.

Baev describes the design as sitting between furniture and sculpture, drawing on minimalist brutalism and a quieter Japanese restraint in equal measure. The emotional reference points are more unusual: the designer cites the atmosphere of Silent Hill and Half-Life, those game environments built from silence and abandoned space, as part of what shaped the object’s mood.

The workflow involved AI assistance across early form studies, structural testing, and design refinement, reducing development time considerably. That footnote is becoming standard across the industry, and it doesn’t add or subtract much here. This process might even become the key to sustainable furniture design, as it can help optimize 3D printing, increase efficiency, and reduce waste in the long run.

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Most of us have a box. Or a bag, or a corner of the closet where clothes go to wait for a fate we haven’t quite settled on yet. Not trash, not donation, just quietly pushed aside. The jeans that stopped fitting but once made you feel unstoppable. The sweater that pilled after three washes but somehow survived four more years. Parting with clothes is harder than it sounds, and the fashion industry has largely treated that emotional gap as a non-problem.

ByBye, a concept designed by Gyeong Wook Kim, Sooa Kim, Gayeon Kim, and Mingyeong Shin, disagrees with that approach in the most literal way possible. It’s a countertop-sized machine that takes your worn and discarded garments and transforms them, through a process of grinding, compression, and heat, into flower pots. Real, usable, actually beautiful flower pots.

Designers: Gyeong Wook Kim, Sooa Kim, Gayeon Kim, Mingyeong Shin

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I want to sit with that idea for a second, because it’s a genuinely clever reframe of the problem. The designers describe ByBye not as a disposal system but as a “system of reform.” That language matters. When we throw clothes away, the garments disappear. When we donate, we hand off the moral weight to someone else. But ByBye asks you to stay present for the transformation and gives you something physical to show for it.

The mechanics are straightforward but impressively considered. You feed garments into the top opening, which uses a sliding rail mechanism to regulate input and automatically closes once the designated weight is reached. Inside, a shredder breaks the fabric down into fine particles. Those particles are then fed into a flower pot mold, compressed by a pressing plate, and hardened through high-temperature treatment. The finished pots rise up from the molding mechanism. The whole process takes about ten minutes per piece, and a companion app tracks fabric weight, the number of pots produced, and total production time.

What comes out of the machine is genuinely surprising. The pots carry a terrazzo-like texture from the mixed fibers, soft and speckled in muted blues, pinks, and greens depending on the fabric input. They look like something you’d find at a design fair, not something born from a pile of worn-out t-shirts. That aesthetic outcome feels important to the whole concept. If the result were dull or utilitarian, the emotional payoff wouldn’t land. Instead, you end up with an object that holds some trace of the original garment, and then holds a plant on top of that.

The project raises questions I keep turning over. Can the machine handle all fabric types, including synthetic blends that behave very differently under heat and compression? What’s the upper limit on pot durability when working with processed textiles? These feel like the natural next steps for a concept this promising, and I genuinely hope the team is pushing toward them.

What ByBye gets absolutely right is the emotional architecture of the experience. The name alone, a gentle play on “bye bye” and “by” as in made by, signals that this isn’t designed to make you feel guilty about your wardrobe. The copy throughout the project, “Hello? Nice to Wear You,” “Let Your Clothes Begin Again,” reads more like an invitation than an environmental lecture. That tone is rare in sustainable design, which has a tendency to lead with shame rather than possibility.

The designers put it plainly in their project statement: “Not a system of disposal, but a system of reform where clothing is seen again, and made anew.” That’s a design philosophy worth paying attention to. Fashion produces staggering amounts of textile waste every year, and while no home appliance is going to fix that alone, concepts like ByBye shift the conversation in a useful direction. They make the ending feel less like a loss and more like a beginning. Parting with clothes is still going to feel like something. But now it might feel like planting something too.

The post Old Clothes Never Die, They Just Become Flower Pots first appeared on Yanko Design.

Recycled plastic products often fall into two camps: grey utilitarian bins or loud, speckled experiments that feel more like proof of concept than something you want on your desk. Tray210 recycled, a collaboration between Korean studio intenxiv and manufacturer INTOPS under the rmrp brand, takes a different approach, using recycled plastics and waste additives to create a tray that feels like a considered object first and an eco story second, treating material diversity as part of the design language.

Tray210 recycled is a circular tray with three compartments, an evolution of the original Tray210 form. It grew out of INTOPS’ grecipe eco-material platform and hida’s CMF proposals, which is a long way of saying it is the result of a tight loop between material science and industrial design. The goal was to pursue material diversity and break away from the cheap recycled stereotype, making something that belongs in sight rather than hidden under a desk.

Designer: Intenxiv x INTOPS

The form is intuitive, a 210 mm circle with a raised, ribbed bar running across the middle and two shallow wells on either side. The central groove is sized for pens, pencils, or chopsticks, and the ribs keep cylindrical objects from rolling away. The side compartments are open and shallow, perfect for earbuds, clips, rings, or keys. It is the kind of layout you understand at a glance without needing instructions or labels; just place your pen where the grooves are.

The material story is where Tray210 recycled gets interesting. Multiple recycled blends reflect their sources: Clam and Wood use 80 percent recycled PP with shell and wood waste, Charcoal adds 15 percent charcoal to 80 percent recycled PP, and Stone uses 10–50 percent recycled ABS. Transparent and Marble variants use recycled PC or PCABS with ceramic particles or marble-like pigment. Each colorway is visually tied to its waste stream, making the origin legible and intentional.

The aim is to create a design closer to the lifestyle rmrp pursues, breaking away from the impression recycled plastic generally gives. The Clam and Wood versions read as soft, muted pastels with fine speckling, Charcoal feels like a deep, almost architectural grey, and Stone and Transparent lean into translucency and particulate. Instead of hiding the recycled content, the CMF work uses it as texture and character, closer to terrazzo or stoneware than to injection-molded scrap that just happens to be grey.

The combination of clear zoning and tactile surfaces makes Tray210 recycled feel at home on a desk, entryway shelf, or bedside table. The central groove keeps your favorite pen or stylus always in the same place, while the side wells catch whatever tends to float around, from SD cards to jewelry. The different material stories let you pick a version that matches how you want the space to feel: calm, earthy, industrial, or a bit more playful.

A simple tray can carry a lot of design thinking, from intuitive ergonomics to material storytelling and responsible sourcing. Tray210 recycled is not trying to save the world on its own, but it does show how recycled plastic can be turned into something you actually want to touch and keep in sight. For people who care about both what an object does and what it is made from, that is a quiet but meaningful upgrade over another anonymous catch-all that eventually ends up in a drawer.

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