While the concept has already been picked up by bloggers, as the designer I feel I should at least provide a brief rationale for the idea. In short, Filterbrella is an umbrella with a canopy that channels rainwater through an activated carbon filter. The handle incorporates standard-size threads so that users can screw in a water or pop-bottle to collect the purified contents to drink later. The entire umbrella is moulded of compostable polylactic acid blends to reduce plastic waste.

I should admit first of all that I never meant this to be seen as a purely utilitarian product. Rather, it is a whimsical, conceptual piece intended to get people thinking about the idea of water use in our society, and the need for (im)permanence in everyday artifacts by taking a cradle-to-cradle approach.

Part of the impetus derives from my longstanding contempt for bottled water and the environmental and ethical ills it embodies. While I recognize that people drink bottled water largely out of convenience, and waiting for a rainstorm is anything but, the Filterbrella would hopefully serve (in some limited capacity) as an everyday reminder of the manner in which we take water utterly for granted. That some sort of rainwater harvesting (or at least greywater recycling) for toilets and gardens isn’t mandatory in new construction continues to baffle me.

(And for the people who have hounded me to make the canopy design more dramatically inverted, like a chanterelle mushroom, I suspect such a shape would result in a seriously top-heavy, unwieldy umbrella, prone to dumping loads of water on the user if it were unbalanced. Not a great way to encourage adoption of the product - besides, in any reasonable downpour you should still get plenty of water.)