Early in 2008, my Green Furniture Design Collaborative project got picked up for a hefty grant from Toyota through their now-defunct Heya program.  With their financial, motivational and emotional support, I was able to design and build a website to host the project and start production on prototypes for an initial line.

The site was built for designers to post ideas and concepts to be critiqued and collaborated on by other designers, greens and creatives to create new and innovative products, and also as a clearinghouse for ecological design research, ideas and resources.

The long-term objective is to have a site where talent and funding can come together, so that designers could put together a team to collaborate online to develop a product, and interested investors could back or buy projects that they saw as having market potential.

The table in the photos was the first prototype to come out of the experiment.  We decided to focus on the urban apartment-dweller as our target market, looking at the most versatile items and most efficient use of space.
The table achieves the goal as it can be reconfigured from a 5-foot long coffee table to a small desk/table.  It is currently undergoing a redesign and is the centerpiece for a full line I am working on.  That was a lot of words just to get to the pictures.