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Herman Miller is reviving an iconic Eames design that hasnt been in production for more than 30 years. The new Eames Molded Plastic Dining Chair looks identical to its archival predecessor, but it’s different in one key way: Its made of 99% recycled plastic. The original Eames Molded Plastic Dining Chair was an evolution of several design techniques pioneered by renowned design duo Ray and Charles Eames. It first went into production in 1970 and was discontinued in 1993. Now, the Herman Miller brand has collaborated with the Eames Officethe family-run foundation dedicated to preserving the married couple’s workto bring the chair into the 21st century. The sustainable twist swaps the original’s virgin plastic for a post-industrial recycled plastic. The chair is currently available online starting at $645, though customers can customize it to their liking for an added fee. Rows of Eames EC-127 chairs after production, March 1973. [Photo: 2025 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.] As Herman Miller has worked with the Eames Office to revive archival designsfrom lamps to tables and coat racksit has been doing so with a focus on sustainable materials. Already, the Herman Miller team has made a 100% recycled plastic version of the Eames Molded Plastic Chair and an iteration of the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman made with plant-based leather. The sustainable Eames reissues, family members say, mark both a continuation of Charles and Rays own core design philosophy of material experimentation. Charles and Eames Office staff member, Don Albinson, posing with Dining Chairs Metal (DCMs) outside the office building in Venice, California. [Photo: 2025 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.] The Eames spirit of experimentation Charles and Ray were, first and foremost, masters of innovation. The couple viewed furniture design as primarily about solving a problem rather than achieving a certain aesthetic. To that end, they experimented constantly with how new materials could make furniture better. In 1945, Charles and Ray were the first designers to figure out how to mold plywood on two planes without it splintering. With this technique, they created the Dining Chair Metal (DCM), a sleek molded plywood chair with a distinct seat and backrest. Just a few years later, the pair began experimenting with new materials for a competition held by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, called the International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design, toying with how to make their designs cheaper and easier to manufacture. The Eames House kitchen in its earliest years, featuring four DCMs that rest in the same place today. c. 1950-51. [Photo: 2025 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.] At first, they tested prototype chairs made from stamped metal. Then, they moved on to fiberglass, which Eames Demetrios, director of the Eames Office and grandson of Charles and Ray, says his grandfather sourced himself from a local autobody shop. Finally, they realized that plastic could make an even more uniform, simple, and inexpensive chair. With their first-ever plastic chair prototype, the duo won second place at the MoMA competition. As they continued to experiment, the duo updated the original molded plywood DCM with a plastic construction in the late 1960sresulting in the first Molded Plastic Dining Chair. They were always trying to make things better, Demetrios says. The really radical idea was to take advantage of the plastic material, which they themselves had pioneered, to bring down the [DCM] price and also make it simpler to make. The new reissue is a continuation of that experimental ethos, he says. [Photo: Kelly Marshall / Herman Miller] Updating a classic, sustainably Like the process of creating a plastic version of the DCM was in the 60s, reviving the Molded Plastic Dining Chair in 2025 was a process of trial and error. Jennifer Nield, SVP of lifestyle product at Herman Miller’s parent company MillerKnoll, says the team knew from the beginning that they wanted to use recycled post-industrial plastic as their core material. Post-industrial plastic is a broad category describing plastic discarded by manufacturers before it actually reaches the consumer, which includes everything from defective consumer packaged goods to automotive scraps. That made finding the right mix of plastic for the job the team’s main challenge. To start, the team tried a 90% recycled resin made from two polymers. But after conducting several trials, which Nield says included dropping a ton of weight on this thing, pulling it, and pushing it in every way you can imagine, they found inconsistencies in the surface quality and durability of the chairs. [Photo: Kelly Marshall / Herman Miller] We kind of went back to the drawing board, Nield says. Ultimately, they settled on using a single polymerrecycled propylene. “[That] allowed us to meet our consistency requirements and then also deliver on those durability and safety standards. It also had a higher recycled content, so we were able to bring it up from 90% to 99% [recycled material]. Demetrios says projects like this one feel like the embodiment of the directive that he was given by Charles and Ray to continue their legacy of material experimentation. The last thing Charles and Ray wanted is to say, Well, we’re dead. No more Eames chairs.”
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E-Commerce
Even though it was built more than 100 years ago, a former engineering lab on the Ford Motor campus in Dearborn, Michigan, is a vision of the company’s future. The building originally opened in 1924 as a kind of early research and development lab, but Ford has now transformed it into a modern office building that the company sees as a model for its new global workplace standards. With more than 300 million square feet of offices in 46 countries, the approach for this one building will have wide implications for the face of the company, and the workforce it’s able to attract. The Ford Engineering Lab, as it is still known, is Ford’s version of a post-pandemic, human-centric workplace, according to Jennifer Kolstad, Ford’s global design and brand director. Sitting on a long curving couch within one of the open collaboration and social spaces in the center of the building, she points out the range of spaces around her. There are small modular meeting rooms, clusters of desks for small teams, café seats, and cushy chairs with side tables that look straight out of a fancy hotel lobby. “Before, Ford Motor Co. was a culture of desks,” Kolstad says. “We have consciously worked to reconstruct the association with how work gets done, which is that work does not necessarily occur at a desk.” A historic setting for a modern workplace An architect whose previous work has included luxury hotels in the Middle East and hospitality design for large architecture firms like Gensler and HKS, Kolstad is no office traditionalist. When she joined Ford in 2019, she set out to bring her hospitality experience to bear on a new kind of workplace. “Part of this work is to encourage people to share information, and to want to be together sharing ideas, in order to be more innovative,” she says. [Photo: Ford] A building from 1924 might seem an odd place for this kind of transformation to begin, but this building was different from the start. Designed by Albert Kahn, the famed industrial architect behind many Ford company buildings and factories, the Lab was intended to spur design innovations by putting ideas people, designers, engineers, and executives all under one roof. [Photo: Ford] And it’s a big roof. The long, two-story, 221,000-square-foot building has room for hundreds of workers, and the original design pushed the office space to its sides. Along the front face of the building there’s a dark wood-lined hallway the company calls Mahogany Row. (Fact check: It’s actually walnut.) Down this hall were the highly prized private offices that executives clamored for when this building originally opened, complete with picture windows to the outside and large anterooms where their personal secretaries sat. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] At the end of Mahogany Row are two larger adjoining offices, one for company founder Henry Ford, and the other for his son, Edsel. The Fords’ offices have been carefully preservedthis was the elder Ford’s last office at the company before his death in 1947but the rest of the spaces on Mahogany Row are now history-tinged conference and meeting rooms, updated with modern equipment and furnishings. [Photo: Ford] On the other side of hat hallway, a door leads to a light-filled open plan space, with a double-height cavern running down its spine. That double-height space, like a top hat on the building, is lined up and down with large skylights that pour daylight throughout. This facility has the DNA of the archetypal Henry Ford assembly line, and it sometimes worked that way. Ford workers could design, engineer, and build full-scale vehicle prototypes all within this one building, the car’s chassis moving through the building while hanging from steel rails that still sit just below the skylights. Ford’s Model A, introduced in 1927, was designed in this building. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] The ‘epicenter’ of a newly centralized corporate campus After many decades of use and several renovationsperplexingly, drop ceilings were added in 1978, blocking out the skylightsthe building was decommissioned by Ford’s real estate arm, Ford Land, in 2007. But its history, and those skylights, played a role in giving the building a second life. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] The company reengaged the building in 2015, and it was highlighted for renovation in a large-scale master planning effort in 2017. The effort was led by the architecture firm Snhetta, which is also behind the design of a 2-million-square-foot R&D hub under construction across the street from the Engineering Lab. Instead of buildings that were previously scattered across the low-density suburbia of Dearborn, Ford is centralizing its offices and facilities into a corporate campus. “This is the epicenter,” Kolstad says, inside the Engineering Lab. “For us, there was no question we were going to make use of this building.” [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] The master plan for rethinking the corporate campus came out in 2019, and also started a process within the company to focus not just on the buildings but how employees use those spaces. Kolstad says the company has embraced the Well Building Standard, along with its evidence-based building design and operation protocols that prioritize human health and well-being. Rather than just thinking of offices as rooms full of desks, the company shifted its focus to environmental sustainability, natural light and materials, biophilic design principles, and the emerging science of neuroaesthetics. “It’s all very core to the way that we’re designing all of our buildings,” Kolstad says. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] New design principles take architectural shape in Ford offices The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic kicked this work into overdrive. Rather than waiting to see these ideas take form in the new research and development building that’s still under construction across the street, Ford folded them into the renovation of the Engineering Lab. Inside the building on a recent day, these principles show up in the varied types of workstations, the formal and informal collaboration areas, the seating, the conference room furnishings, and especially, in all that natural light. Groups of workers could be seen gathering around large screens in quiet conference rooms, while one-on-one meetings were happening at the central café space or on a long library table or on the steps of a grandstand-style tiered seating structure. On one end of the building, an open floor was peppered with a more traditional layout of individual desks, though even these rows were interrupted with clusters of desks pulled together seemingly ad hoc. “All of it is meant to evolve over time and, frankly, let our employes decide how they want to use the space,” Kolstad says. [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] ‘We better be looking good to them’: Building loyalty among a new generation of workers When Kolstad joined Ford, part of the job was to reckon with the demographic reality that an estimated 60% of the company’s workforce was turning over within the following decade. “That really struck me because it meant that we were going to have this totally regenerated new younger workforce that had no historical loyalty to the company, necessarily,” she says. “So part of our work is about reestablishing that. We’ve got Gen Z, we’re now moving toward Gen Alpha joining us. We better be looking good to them, and ready for them.” [Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy Ford] Kolstad says the Engineering Lab, and the broader workplace transformation underway across Ford’s real estate portfolio, is all about designing for outcomes. She calls the approach “human affordance thinking,” and says every design decision was considered through the lens of improving workers’ experiences. “We were asking the question, do we believe it’s going to sustain a desired outcome, like innovation or collaboration or community building. And if it didn’t, we vetted it, and we didn’t allow it to move forward,” she says. The efficacy of these design approaches will likely become more clear in the coming months. Ford is instituting a five-day return to office policy in September, up from the current three. Having people in this office building every day will help Kolstad and her team understand how the design is, or maybe isn’t, creating the conditions for those worker experiences and outcomes. Whatever they learn, she says the building is set up to be able to evolve. And this approach is being implemented in Ford’s other offices around the world, and will even trickle out into its dealerships in the coming years. The goals for the new Ford offices go beyond aesthetics or office amenities, she says, though those are both important. “This is as much about cultural change as it is about physical tools,” she says. “These buildings are just tools.”
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E-Commerce
The Russian invasion of Ukraine will have long-lasting consequences for all of us. Like the 1939 invasion of Poland introduced the world to blitzkrieghigh-speed tanks and air power quickly jumping enveloping and eliminating enemy linesthis war is the herald of a new military era of relentless unmanned war machines hunting the enemy through air, land, and water. The drones are part of a new, high-speed technological race with a major unintended consequence: endless miles of plastic string pollution. After Russia’s wireless first-person view (FPV) drones were routinely thwarted by Ukrainian radio interference weapons, some unknown Russian engineer thought the best way to neutralize these countermeasures was by ditching radio signals for miles-long cables, just like some wire-guided anti-tank missiles use. The method proved successful for Russia. And now Ukranians have copied it, as the frontlines are quickly filling up with white plastic cables that sometimes cover entire fields, forests, and small towns. [Photo: Getty Images] These plastic spider-webs are invading everything, as the two sides relentlessly launch wave after wave of these kamikaze machines, each of them equipped with spools of fiber-optic cables that directly connect the drones to the pilots that use joysticks and virtual reality goggles to control them. At the beginning, they could barely reach 3 to 6 miles. Today, they’re striking targets at distances exceeding 25 miles. You would think that 25 miles of cable would be impossible for a light FPV drone to lift, but the fiber-optics cables are so thin and light that only weigh a few pounds. “Three months ago, we were testing fiber-optic drones with a range of up to 12 miles. Today, these systems are already capable of hitting enemy targets at distances beyond 25 miles,” Mykhailo Fedorov, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, announced on Telegram at the end of July. “Strikes at a depth of 25+ mils are becoming the new norm for fiber-optic drones,” he said. Russian videos now show spools extending to 31 miles that weigh less than 8.8 poundswhich makes them suitable for larger drones. You can also order the spools from China, complete with all the necessary electronics. Lets do some math. As of 2025, Ukraines total FPV drone production capacity has surged to 200,000 units per month from the initial 20,000 units produced monthly in early 2024. Approximately 10% of the total Ukrainian drone output is now fiber-optic guided. The Russian numbers are not as clear. As of July 2025, tens of thousands of units of the wire-guided Prince Vandal drone are produced monthly, according to the official news agency TASS. Another source puts that number at 6,000 units per month. Lets say its a conservative total of 15,000 drones for both sides. At 25 miles of cable per drone, thats 375,000 miles of plastic cable, enough to circle the Earths equator 15 times. Thats a lot of trash which will have a dramatic effect on agriculture, fauna and flora, and people’s lives for years to come. Things will get bad before they get worse Of course, with their immediate survival on the line and with Trump and Putin playing Risk with their homeland, infinite plastic spiderwebs are the last thing that the Ukrainians are thinking about right now. But there is no doubt that, as this technological arms race accelerates, so will the environmental catastrophe for a country that has already been razed to the ground in many places. “Due to their composition, these cables could persist in the environment for more than 600 years, posing a substantial long-term threat,” warns Leon Moreland, researcher at the Conflict and Environmental Observatory. With the new longer-range systems now being deployed on an industrial scale, the environmental impact is multiplying exponentially. The cables form dangerous networks across trees and clearings that will pose a significant risk of entanglement and death to many species, including threatened birds and bats, for years to come, says Charlie Russell, University of East Anglia researcher who focuses on wars impact on migratory birds. The materials used make them difficult to identify and unlikely to naturally degrade, and they already cover vast swathes of important habitats. Removing them will be difficult but integral to long-term conservation efforts post-conflict. The risks go beyond wldlife. They’re also a danger to vehicles, affecting everything from agricultural machinery to fire trucks fighting forest fires. Additionally, they will complicate future de-mining operations, as they can get tangled in the heavy machinery used to clear minefields. Pollution begets more pollution Beyond the direct and immediate issues caused by endless miles of cabling, they will cause even more problems over time as they slowly degrade. They will release contaminants, Moreland says. Their PMMA core (PolymethylMethacrylate) core can generate microplastics and nanoplastics. These tiny particles can inhibit agricultural crop growth, which is a major problem for a country that is one of the main global producers and exporters of corn and wheat. The plastic will inexorably get into the food chain and reach humans, accumulating in different parts of the body, especially on infants. Burning the wires first isn’t a solution, as the cables will release toxic gases like nitric oxide. Their outer coating belongs to the PFAS family, the so-called forever chemicals due to their extreme environmental persistence. “Along with munitions and firefighting foams, this fiber constitutes another military source of PFAS,” which contaminates soils and waters, Moreland notes. For the Ukrainians, the only silver lining to these noxious cables is that they can be used to trace their pilots: The fiber-optic becomes visible when illuminated by low-angled sunlight, creating clear vectors pointing back to enemy positions. So far, this reportedly led to the elimination of a five-person Russian drone team. But of course, the same can be said about the Ukrainian positions. Its never-ending cycle of destruction that will not stop. Its, in fact, accelerating. “We are developing a technology that accurately and flawlessly destroys the enemy,” Fedorov says. Ukraine has now codified and approved about 40 samples of unmanned aircraft systems using fiber-optic control channels since the beginning of 2025, while production capacity keeps ramping up. Its also likely that Ukraine companies will start sharing their extensive expertise with the rest of European countries, which are now quickly rearming to face the imperialist thirst of Vladimir Putin after the United States turned its back on them. Other countries will follow, Moreland points out: China is already testing this technology. The success of fiber-optic drones in Ukraine virtually guarantees their proliferation to other conflicts worldwide. Every successful mission adds to the accumulating miles of fiber-optic cable abandoned on the ground. As production scales from thousands to potentially tens of thousands of drones per month, and as ranges extend from 25 to 40+ miles, the plastic spider web grows ever denser. This new type of war pollutiona plastic legacy designed to last centuriescontinues expanding with each technological breakthrough. Right now, the solution to this unexpected environmental catastrophe remains as elusive as intercepting the drones themselves, while the invisible threads of modern warfare continue spinning their deadly, permanent web across the battlefields of the future.
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