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About


 

What can one company do?

 

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About


 

What can one company do?

 

Gone Studio

One summer morning in 2010 I was in my kitchen working on a prototype for an iPad case I'd designed. In the other room, the TV was reporting that millions of gallons of oil were pouring from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig into the Gulf of Mexico. In that moment, I made up my mind to make my new product plastic-free. Now, over five years later, Gone Studio's products are not only plastic-free, they’re also zero-waste and even zero-energy in that I handcraft them all without automated machinery.

George Elvin

I'm the founder of Gone Studio, the company pioneering post-petroleum design and zero-plastic, zero-waste, zero-electricity manufacturing. My designs have been featured by the Discovery Channel, Macworld, Treehugger and over fifty other green design venues. The author of over forty books and articles, my works on green design and technology have been published by Routledge, Wiley, and Princeton Architectural Press, among others. My most recent book, Post-Petroleum Design, has been called "a must read for anyone wondering how we built our plastics economy - and how we might move beyond it." My talks and workshops have inspired audiences in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas for decades.

I spent my childhood losing myself in the 600 acres of forest that stretched from my back door to the Potomac River. During high school I worked for the CIA, although it was in the cafeteria at their Langley headquarters. After high school, as my friends went off to college, I went to train at a Zen Buddhist monastery. In 1981 I founded my own design-build firm in Washington DC, and in 1998 received my PhD in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. I've been an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. I'm currently an Associate Professor of Architecture at Ball State University.