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February 22 2012
Sand Engine Reinforces Dutch Coastline
Now here is an hands-on example of ‘guided growth‘ as a way to steer complex systems.
Part of the Dutch coastline is currently being reinforced by creating a ‘sand engine’. This involves depositing 21.5 million cubic meters of sand in the shape of a hook extending from the coast near Ter Heijde. The sand is expected to be spread along the provincial coastline by the natural motion of wind, waves and currents. Ultimately the coast is expected to be broader and safer.
Simulation of the expected functioning of the sand engine
Click here to view the embedded video.
Website: Sandengine.nl Thanks to Premsela.org
February 20 2012
Surviving Progress
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Montreal filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks’ documentary feature, Surviving Progress presents the story of human advancement and reveals the risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. It is up to us to prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.
Thanks Linda.
February 19 2012
Edible Implants
Why turn to implants when the female body can do it by itself? Dutch designer Femke Mosch came up with the idea of making edible implants that stimulate breast growth from within.
February 17 2012
Broersen & Lukács – Mastering Bambi
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Media artists Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács created a remake of the Disney classic Bambi from which they stripped all the inhabitants. The removal of the cuddly, anthropomorphic animals makes the utopian construction of the pristine wilderness visible. Movie starts after 1:50 min introduction.
February 15 2012
Meat the Future
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This promotional video for in-vitro meat was brought to you by the bureau for in-vitro meat promotion students of the Beckmans College of Design.
February 14 2012
The Relative Size of Old Nature
Created by Cary Huang, this interactive scale of the universe shows the relative sizes of everything from quarks to the Hoover Dam. Be prepared for some cosmic gee-whiz moments when you get out to the nebulas. The objects are complimented with cheeky facts such as “If you were to stretch your skin over Vatican City, the coating would be 200 nanometers thick.” Just a reminder that there’s still an incomprehensibly huge amount of ‘old nature’ out there left to explore.
February 12 2012
#11: Don’t Use Anthropomorphism if it Does Not Serve Any Purpose
Part 11 of the series 11 Golden Rules of Anthropomorphism and Design
Anthropomorphism can be a powerful tool in product design. But there are also risks involved that urge designers to be careful in their implementation. This final Golden Rule is also a warning: Don’t use anthropomorphism simply to ‘dress up’ a product; it will make it distracting and confusing, and although it may increase the initial appeal of the product, people will soon lose interest for it, as the promise of human likeness is empty.
February 11 2012
Tuur van Balen – Hacking Yoghurt
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While most people think biotechnology is complex, expensive and exclusively practiced in fancy lab settings, designer Tuur van Balen argues it is actually quite accessible. He demonstrates his vision on DIY biotechnology by creating an ‘anti-depressant yoghurt’ on stage.
February 09 2012
Evolution is Blind
…thus it walks into a lot of dead alleys. Peculiar image of the week.
February 06 2012
#10: Enhance Human Experience, Don’t Replace it
Part 10 in the 11 part series Anthropomorphism and Design.
The hidden danger with interactive products is that they will become so good at fulfilling our needs that they start to replace actual humans. This is not a futuristic scenario: In an increasing number of locations, from supermarket self-scan checkouts to online bookstores, automatization has replaced human contact. Eventually this may lead to us becoming alienated from other people, which seems to contradict today’s rapidly increasing communication possibilities. Anthropomorphic products have the potential to support, stimulate and enhance human contact, but they may also eliminate it.
February 04 2012
Thijs Zonneveld – Let’s build a Mountain
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“God created the world, except for the Netherlands. That the Dutch created themselves”, Voltaire remarked in the eighteenth century already to describe the overly cultivated Dutch landscape. But when the Dutch built the Netherlands, they forgot to add any mountains. Former cyclist and visionary Thijs Zonneveld was annoyed by the lack of cyclable heights and proposed to build a 2000-meter high mountain in the Netherlands. Ridiculous idea or summit of Dutch Design?
Unlike the earlier purely theoretical proposal by Jacob Tigges in Berlin, the people behind Die Berg Komt Er (That Mountain will be There) are taking their landscape-building mandate seriously. Their ‘mountain’ should really be understood as a very large building with all kinds of functions ranging from housing, to recreation, to sustainable energy source.
Watch the presentation Tijs gave at the Next Nature Power Show last fall. If you feel the Dutch Mountain should be realized you can buy a 50 euro certificate to support their feasibility research.
February 03 2012
Ice Cream Cones Made from Ice Cream, and Other Wikicells
Plastic is a part of the earth’s ecosystem, but it’s a part that no one wants. At Harvard, scientists are looking to replace single-use plastic bottles, plates, and cups with packaging that not only biodegrades, but tastes great. These so-called Wikicells are made up of liquid or solid food contained within an organic membrane that’s held together by electrostatic forces – the same forces that cause cling wrap to cling. In the wonderful world of Wikicells, the wrap around a cut of in-vitro beef could contain the sauce, or an ice cream cone could be made from actual cream. If the scientists get it right, we may soon have an edible way to stop using plastic bags and bottles that take 500 to 1,000 years to degrade.
Photo via The Way We See the World.
February 02 2012
Hybrid Hummer
Who knows after some future energy crisis, it becomes en vogue to use a horse to pull your horseless carriage. For now it is our peculiar image of the week. Created by Walter Robinson.
January 31 2012
#9: Be Aware of the Ecosystem You’re Invading
Part 9 in the 11 part series Anthropomorphism and Design.
With most products, one wouldn’t normally worry about the environment that it enters. However, anthropomorphic products inevitably elicit responses from others, even from non-human entities. This can have obvious advantages, for instance, when a human-shaped scarecrow frightens off the birds. But when daddy’s new toy frightens the children or the pets, there is a significant chance that it will end up on the attic. Bringing home an anthropomorphic product can be like introducing a new person into the household, which doesn’t always go as smoothly as the family might hope.
Image via I’m Not Obsessed.
January 30 2012
Years
Good old analog technology, now even better than ever before. Artist Bartholomäus Traubeck created a hyper-nostalgic record player that, rather than making music from vintage vinyl records, uses slices of woods to generate sound.
The player analyses a tree’s year rings for their strength, thickness and rate of growth as input for a generative algorithm that outputs piano music. Watch the video to enjoy the sound of a tree and appreciate the beauty and variety of nature from a whole new unexpected perspective.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Thanks Yuri Keukens.
January 29 2012
Medicinal Blueberries
As our scientific knowledge of nutritious food increases, will healthy foods be progressively designed to look like medicines? This blueberry blister packaging created by Chinese designer Daizi Zheng certainly points in that direction.
Although utterly over-designed and unsustainably over-packaged, this might well be a product patients suffering from the healthy eating disease Orthorexia Nervosa would crave for.
January 28 2012
Goats Replace Lawnmowers in San Francisco
They might not be as fast, but goats offer several advantages over diesel-powered lawnmowers. They’re quieter, they emit fewer greenhouse gases, and they fertilize soil as they go for no extra charge. They can easily climb slopes where mowers can’t reach, and can clear thick brush without the help of herbicides. City Grazing of San Francisco has capitalized on the benefits of goats, and leases out their 50-member herd for landscaping needs around the city.
These back-to-the basics of landscapers who replace mowers with goats, or farmers who replace tractors with horses, represent an unusual trajectory for the Hierarchy of Technology.* Technologies normally become accepted and widely-used before they are superseded by new technologies and sink out of sight. Except for meat production, livestock has largely lost out to machinery in industrialized settings. In a time where oil was cheap and global warming unknown, goats and horses were clearly obsolete. But in other contexts – greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, cuteness – it becomes clear that old-fashioned, four-legged technologies can become cutting-edge a second time.
*For more about the Maslow-style Hierarchy of Technology, get your hooves on a copy of the Next Nature book.
January 27 2012
Mark Post – Meet the New Meat
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As we are moving towards 9 billion people living on our planet, it seems impossible to continue producing & consuming meat like we do today. Will we soon all be eating rice and beans? Perhaps. Yet professor Mark Post thinks otherwise.
At the Next Nature Power Show, Mark Post presented his plan to create the first lab-grown hamburger. He argues lab-grown meat could become the environmentally friendly alternative for breeding cows and pigs for meat consumption. It is relatively simple to take stem cells from an animal and grow them to produce new muscle tissue. Simply add sugar, proteins and fat and get it into shape with a bit of exercise to created edible meat. The only problem then is to find a new role for our livestock.
January 26 2012
Rule #8: Use Human Ethics
Part 8 of the 11 part series Anthropomorphism and Design.
Anthropomorphic products blur the boundaries between products and people. Ethical norms for people don’t usually apply to products and vice versa. For example, there’s no need to apologize if you accidentally run into an object. But with an anthropomorphic product, you might instinctively say sorry, because it seems like the right thing to do. People can apply their attitude towards humans to products, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But transferring attitudes from a product to a human might lead to problems, especially when the product induces abnormal social behavior. Don’t make your product do what you wouldn’t want a person to do.
Image via Lazy Bone.
Transparent Smart Window
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Displays have been on our desks for too long. Samsung makes space and introduces the Transparent Smart Window. This LCD touchscreen is powered by the sunlight shining from the outside in. During the night time when there is no light to power the device, one can switch to night mode and use an edge-lit backlight instead. Though still a prototype, the possibilities and consequenses are endless — within the frame that is.
- thanks Martijn Lammerts
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