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Sustainability Times
2 days ago
- Sustainability Times
Chinese Product Designer Yihan Luo Showcased 'Pikapoo' at Milan Design Week 2025
By Hina Dinoo Her award-winning autonomous pet waste system, Pikapoo, was featured at Tortona Design Week as part of Milan Design Week 2025 under the theme 'Design rEvolution: Creative Connections.' Chinese product designer Yihan Luo recently presented her groundbreaking robotic system Pikapoo at the 2025 edition of Milan Design Week, the world's most influential design event. Her project was exhibited within the Tortona Design Week district—one of the festival's key venues—under the curatorial theme 'Design rEvolution: Creative Connections.' The showcase highlighted innovative design responses to contemporary social and environmental challenges, and Luo's project stood out for its integration of sustainable technology, user-centered design, and urban health awareness. Held from April 7 to 13, 2025, Tortona Design Week transformed Milan's Tortona district into a dynamic laboratory of creativity, innovation, and research. Under the theme 'Design rEvolution: Creative Connections,' the event celebrated the power of connections in the design world, bringing together disciplines, ideas, and visions to create a week of discoveries and inspiration. The district hosted a diverse array of exhibitions and installations, focusing on smart materials, sustainable infrastructures, and designs that engage the senses. International brands and designers converged to explore new perspectives on contemporary design, fostering a dialogue that merges aesthetics, technology, and functionality. Conceived during China's COVID-19 lockdown, Pikapoo emerged from Luo's observations of widespread pet waste on neighborhood lawns and her user research into pet owner behaviors. Many respondents mistakenly believed that dog feces acted as natural fertilizer. In truth, dog waste contains bacteria harmful to vegetation and public health. Existing cleanup tools offered little innovation—often requiring direct contact and lacking eco-friendly disposal methods. In response, Luo developed Pikapoo , an autonomous robotic pet waste management system that combines product design, interaction design, and service design. The system includes a mobile app-controlled robot ( Poobot ) that identifies and collects waste, and a companion unit ( Poobase ) that composts it into fertilizer using biological catalysts. The system also offers health diagnostics by analyzing samples, providing pet owners with medical insights via the app. Following its debut as her graduation project, Pikapoo quickly garnered widespread attention. Luo collaborated with an engineer to further refine the design before submitting it to international competitions. The project won multiple honors, including the 2025 iF Design Award (Robotics), the IDA Design Award, and the 2025 French Design Award, recognizing both its functionality and environmental relevance. These accolades helped secure its selection for exhibition at Milan Design Week 2025—a key milestone in Luo's early career. At the Tortona venue, Pikapoo was exhibited alongside other future-facing solutions focused on urban sustainability and smart interaction. Visitors experienced a live demonstration of the robot's capabilities, the composting cycle, and health reporting features, illustrating the full lifecycle of how waste can be transformed into insight and utility. The installation embodied Tortona's mission to highlight 'connected design' that merges aesthetics, responsibility, and technology. About the Designer Yihan Luo is an interaction and product designer known for her ability to merge sustainability, social impact, and emerging technologies. Educated at ArtCenter College of Design and the University of Southern California, Luo's design philosophy is rooted in bridging physical systems with digital user experiences. Her work addresses overlooked problems—like uncollected dog waste—and reimagines them as opportunities for environmental and social innovation. Her participation in Milan Design Week 2025 signals a growing international recognition of Chinese designers engaging with global issues through deeply considered, human-centered approaches. As she continues to develop solutions at the intersection of robotics, ecology, and user behavior, Luo is poised to become a leading voice in next-generation design thinking. Did you like it? 4.5/5 (22)
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When a Chair Is More Than a Chair
New York Design Week always inundates the city with sumptuous materials and one-of-a-kind objets — coffee tables made of imported marble, custom lamps with brass hardware and sofas upholstered in wool. But 'OUTSIDE/IN,' a show at Lyle Gallery on the Lower East Side, offers something more, with pieces that lean into the makers' heritage and backgrounds. Lighting fixtures are inspired by the Indian tradition of hair oiling, a chair is meant to soothe anxiety and wall art is made of construction materials tied to a childhood memory. Here, the stories are what matter. 'Everything has some sort of background to it, or it has layers and guts to it. It's not living just to be a fancy-ass chair for rich people,' said Lin Tyrpien, who co-curated the show with Jenny Nguyen, the founder of the public relations company Hello Human. Now in its 13th year, the annual NYCxDESIGN Festival brings together designers and manufacturers to exhibit new furnishings and home décor, with events taking place all over the city. On view through June 1, the show at Lyle Gallery features 12 designers, most of whom are emerging. The gallery held an open call for furniture makers and artists, which received over 200 submissions, through which Ms. Tyrpien and Ms. Nguyen selected the works to be featured. The designers come from across the globe, including Senegal, Nigeria, India and more. Ms. Tyrpien, who is a co-owner of the gallery, said that the recent anti-D.E.I. movements have been another impetus for the show. 'With funding being gone from a lot of D.E.I. initiatives, what a timely thing to be combating that,' she said. Here's a look at some of the designers in the show and the stories behind their work. The interviews below have been lightly edited for length and clarity. Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary Studio: soft-geometry Location: Los Angeles Work: 'Long Haired Sconces' made with hemp and lime composite How do your pieces speak to the significance of hair in your culture? Utharaa Zacharias: Palaash and I both grew up in India, and we have this shared memory. My mom and two sisters would line up on a Sunday afternoon, apply coconut oil on each other's hair, massage each other's head and then braid the hair to let it soak in. Palaash has a similar memory of massaging his grandmother's hair with oil. And now that we're in the U.S., really far away from home, we do these same rituals for each other — it's become our Sunday ritual to oil each other's hair. The idea for these pieces was to create a portrait that is inspired by that choreography of caring for your hair and caring for each other's hair and finding softness in that ritual. Steffany Trần Studio: Vy Voi Location: Queens Work: 'Kite In-Flight' lamp made with Dó paper This piece was inspired by the Vietnamese whistling kite. What drew you to the kite as a subject to explore? It's a kite that's over 2,000 years old. It's very historic to Vietnam and very unique to Vietnam. It has jackfruit wood whistles, so when it's actually in the air, it creates this really beautiful moment of sound and whimsy. I was really delighted by this idea of, how do we capture this rich piece of history into a piece of modern design that honors that spirit? And why a lamp, as opposed to a chair or table or something else? I think lighting is one of those things that we really take for granted. It's something that we live with every day — whether that's overhead lighting, desk lighting, floor lighting — but there's something really nice about creating this sculptural moment where I felt like we could capture the idea of a kite flying in the air against the sun. Monica Curiel Location: Denver Work: 'La Mari' sculptural painting made of spackling paste You chose spackling paste as your medium because your father works in construction. What was your family's reaction to you creating art with this material? During Covid, materials were expensive and stores were closed, and I reverted back to spackling paste and plaster, because they were materials that I grew up using because I would go to work with my father to his job sites. I thought I'd use it for experimentation, but I had this love for the material again. It wasn't until I did my B.F.A. show in 2021 that my parents were like, 'We don't really understand what you're doing. Like, you sketch?' They don't have a higher education, and so to them it was foreign. Then he looked at a painting and he was like, 'I don't get it, but I understand how you made it.' And I realized that this material is a language; it's bridging a gap. Then he read my bio statement, and he said, "You know, I really would like you to take out the part that you're an immigrant and Mexican.' And I was like, 'What? I thought you would be so proud of it.' And with tears in his eyes, he said, 'I don't want you to face the racism your mom and I have faced.' And it was in that moment that I thought, wow, what did this material just do? Tanuvi Hegde Location: Brooklyn Work: 'Reflect' chair made with cherry wood and leather This chair is meant to be fidgeted with — you can roll the ball from one arm to the other. What is the purpose of that movement? I am a very anxious person, and I like to fidget a lot. So I was thinking about how anxiety physically shows up in the body. And I kept coming back to little fidget moments with respect to your hands, like either you're tapping your fingers or you're rolling something in your hands. I wanted to combine all of that and design a chair that leans into that. I also was working with the idea that a chair, more specific than any other form of furniture, is meant to keep you still, like it stills the body. But what if, instead of asking the body to be still, you let the furniture meet the body where it already is — and it wants to fidget, and it wants to play around with you. Sandia Nassila and Toluwalase Rufai Studio: Salù Iwadi Studio Location: Dakar, Senegal and Lagos, Nigeria Work: 'Zangbeto' side table made of iroko wood What story are you trying to tell with this piece? Toluwalase Rufai: It's rooted in the culture of the Zangbeto masquerade of Benin. They are coined to be the protectors of the night — they hover and then they rotate to protect the people in the community — and we were mesmerized by this oscillating motion. It's a very mystical, mysterious masquerade. So we wanted to embody that — how could a furniture piece educate you on a part of the culture and also bring different meanings to it? And how can we capture movement in a static object?
