A new laser etching technique might make the small labels on fruits and vegetables a thing of the past.

Casa Huerta (Orchard House) is a small scale greenhouse / vertical farming system proposed to better life in the poor areas of the world’s cities.

Paul Coudamy is a French architect whose work is a contemporary mash up of inventiveness supplied by today’s technologies and materials.

The Energy Belt designed by Massimo Iosa Ghini is a solar powered monorail proposed as a sustainable transportation solution, connecting the Italian city of Bologna with the city’s international airport.

Each year during Tokyo Design Week, DesignTide Tokyo features top design innovations from a variety of fields. With today marking the end of the five-day event, we’ve highlighted three projects below that we find particularly inspirational.

“Living Light” is a piece of public art that uses networked panels to reveal the real-time air quality of each neighborhood in Seoul, South Korea.

William Stranger’s “Second Life” uses reclaimed wood from a local LA bowling alley to create a number of different works including a coffee table, a bench and a diptych.

Next week, PSFK will be hosting Good Ideas Salon, Brooklyn. We’ll be enjoying local fare, and featuring a panel of guest speakers discussing small batch culture and local entrepreneurship.

The Felt Wine Rack is a perfect example of the return simple materials as designers and consumers alike warm to the aesthetic, environmental and economic benefits of products made from natural elements.

To offset the disruptive irrigation effects brought on by global warming, the small village of Stakmo, India has been developing a method for creating their own artificial glaciers.

Korean designer Yong-jin Kim merges the power socket with a traditional switch, a solution that replaces the act of removing a plug with a simple twist designed to cut off the flow of electricity.

Sustainable Minds has created a piece of software that can help asses life cycle impact of potential products based on factors such as materials used.

University of the Arts in Philly students Jin Hong, Sebastian Brauer, Ji In Sun, and Jackie Starker have designed a series of “durable, watertight, and wind-resistant garments that are lightweight enough for everyday wear yet easily convertible into tents or sleeping bags that can brave the elements.”

Automakers have made attempts to create more environmentally friendly factories before. Subaru even leveraged its zero landfill factory in Indiana as part of an advertising campaign. But Toyota looks to have raised the bar to a new height by engineering two new flowering plants to help clean the air at its Toyota City factory in Japan.

Rice farming usually conjures mental images of vast, sprawling rice paddies. That’s not always the case, as Tokyo Green Space recently discovered.