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February 23 2012
Growing Plants in the Dark
While sunlight contains all colors, the dominant type of chlorophyll in plants only needs purple light to function. This simple fact has big implications for the future of farming. Crops planted in soil, of course, depend on the sun, while commercial greenhouses use white light to grow their crops. All that extra red, green and yellow energy is wasted on the plants.
PlantLab has taken advantage of chlorophyll’s little quirk. By using red and blue LEDs to create purple light, they have dramatically cut the energy needed to grow plants indoors. The special lights boost the efficiency of photosynthesis from 9% to between 12 and 15%. Growing plants in a closed system conserves heat, water, and nutrients, and cuts the need for pesticides. Since the crops no longer need access to sunlight, they can be grown in dense stacks. The future of vertical farming looks a lot like a nightclub for plants.
Watch the introductory video here.
February 07 2012
Essay: Time Between Emergence and Design
Previously, experiences of time emerged from nature as given – offering seasons, the rhythm of humans, plants and animals. Nowadays, people integrate nature-time, body-time, inner-time, clock-time, and global 24/7 systems-time. Human beings, in past, current and next natures, have to deal with emergence and design of time in order to survive.
By CAROLINE NEVEJAN
To think about how future new worlds are visualized, assumes that these images reveal how life in decades to come will be shaped. These visualizations offer insight into today’s imagination of next natures and next cultures to come. However, in these visualizations ‘time’ as a process of emergence and design, is often forgotten. This essay argues that time design is distinct in any next nature that will emerge.
Witnessing Spatiotemporal Trajectories
At the end of his life, American philosopher Thomas Kuhn1 concluded that in communities of practice human beings’ need to recognize other beings’ spatiotemporal trajectories to be able to share concepts and thereby develop language. In this statement he suggests that without understanding other beings’ movements through time and space no communication will be possible. This statement challenges today’s experience of global systems-time of millions of people who manage to communicate with people they do not know or see in the online world. Nevertheless in today’s experience the feeling of having ‘no time’ has become a common good. Reaching out to anyone anywhere seems to generate ‘no time’ as a result. Will human beings be able to overcome the loss of sharing spatiotemporal trajectories and share concepts in next natures to come? What time design requirements would be needed to facilitate a time design that will foster the emergence of communication and possible new language as well?
In the past 15 years systems-time has invaded and restructured many professional practices the world over and people have developed a variety of time designs to make the 24/7 economy work for them. Without formulating it as such, a widespread knowledge and experience of time design has emerged in businesses, organizations and personal practices too. In current interdisciplinary research at the Delft Technical University, four features have surfaced as being crucial in time design for human beings involved: integrating rhythm, synchronizing performance, moments to signify and duration of engagement. Hereunder these four dimensions are outlined with the awareness that more research in any of these will benefit future time design.
Integrating Rhythms
When working in distributed teams, organizing a shared rhythm is crucial for keeping communication and business processes in flow (2). Simple things, like one well-structured online meeting a week, generate trust and well being for all involved. When working in different time zones, adaptation to others at the expense of personal time has to be taken into account. In small businesses people benefit from the fact that distributed work on a day-to-day basis facilitates personal life styles for those involved. Finding the ultimate rhythm between people’s personal time given the work that has to be done, is crucial for success. Global 24/7 systems-time has expanded human experience of time fundamentally. It offers immediate connections to other places anywhere facilitating interaction and transaction anytime and affects social structures of finance, law, business and family life profoundly. Human beings, through a methodology of trial and error, find solutions to integrate different rhythms they are confronted with. Different kinds of time merge necessarily in personal, social and collective experience of time: nature-time, body-time, inner-time, clock-time and systems-time.
Human beings have to deal with emergence and design of time in order to survive.
Nature-time has a huge diversity of scale in time designs. Long eras and short time spans, stretched rhythms and instant events are deeply interwoven. This is the environment in which human presence exists. Human bodies can only exist in one place and therefore human beings have partial perspective on nature-time as a whole. Human biological existence, the holder of body-time, is dependent on rhythms like day and night, heartbeat and breath. Human existence also contains a sense of psychological inner-time, which has hardly been investigated and yet underlies processes of growth and transformation and defines how social situations and events are perceived (3).
Many centuries ago clock-time was introduced to mechanically structure shared social time. In the variety of clock-times, nature-time was integrated. Whether the clock was made by use of the sun, by smaller and smaller radars or by digits in contemporary design; clocks made it possible to socially anticipate what will happen next. Clock-time always offers a local perspective on time because it is fundamentally connected to a specific region or place. Places are defined by nature-time offering seasons, climates and specific ecological systems that characterize a place. Clock-time and nature-time are integrated in local agendas take that into account the context in which the human body survives.
Integrating rhythm is part of any next nature that will emerge
Today’s systems-time, based on algorithms operating on a global scale, is changing the planetary landscape profoundly. Where before systems were built on principles of mandate and delegation, systems have become participants in communities of people in their own right (4). Systems need clock-time to synchronize, but they are detached from nature-time. Like climate and weather, systems-time can also only be known through partial perspective, but unlike climate and weather, human beings can communicate in systems-time and many millions do so everyday. Above all the use and impact of systems-time is its immediacy. Human beings can travel to expand their experience and mental map of the place they live. Systems-time offers an expansion of connection in an instant, any place anytime. It fosters the experience of being in one place while bodies involved reside in different places. Just as nature-time profoundly challenges human existence, so does systems-time.
Nature-, body-, inner- and clock- time offer rhythms that are shared and structure social life. Rhythms cannot not integrate (5). Over several centuries humankind developed a conscious integration of rhythms, inventing work hours, school hours, lunch breaks, agendas, holidays and more. Systems-time is challenging the integration of rhythms, since it does not seem to have a rhythm of its own. In day-to-day experience individuals integrate systems-time to their benefit, but for organizations this is more problematic. Research into beneficial systems-time design has not been taken up yet. Integrating rhythm is part of any next nature that will emerge, even though it is not clear which rhythm will dominate human life in the end. Human beings need to recognize and integrate rhythms to survive: nature-time, body-time, clock-time, inner-time. Especially systems-time, which gains importance day by day, is hard for human beings to recognize even though systems participate in human society more and more.
Synchronizing Performance
In seeking well-being and survival human presence judges and anticipates what will come next. In meeting a new person there is a moment when the encounter starts. Bodies reach out through perception and from the first instance a careful tuning of presence emerges. Lots of tacit knowledge is exchanged in such moments of exploring doubt and hesitation. Granular perception offers instant negotiation resulting in synchronizing the performance of presence to establish common ground upon which interaction may proceed.
The tuning of body rhythms in this process is profound; already a piece of glass between two people sitting at the same table breaks synaesthesia between them (5). Sensory perceptions, simple emotions and more complex feelings influence processes of synchronization fundamentally. To facilitate synchronization social structures have invented gestures of encounter. The handshake is such an example. Body language is distinct in these moments; the possible recognizing of each other’s spatiotemporal trajectories is at stake.
Mediating granular perception is complex. Collaborating distributed teams cannot communicate a simple phenomenon like color, for example (6). Nevertheless, human beings do synchronize in mediated communication in the variety of media they use. In a phone call – where bodies are not present but the voice is – this negotiation happens through a switch between talking at the same time and silences that are just too long before conversation continues smoothly. SMSes need to arrive just in time and so on. On the Internet, digital handshakes have the character of ‘pitching one’s presence’ after a period of investigating an online environment (7).
And even during participation, the process of synchronization is continuously ongoing in social networks and mailing lists because community members correct each other all the time to protect the ‘tone of voice’ they have agreed upon. When not sharing physical interaction people synchronize through engagement in time, through pitching and judging performance, through social control. Synchronization of performance of presence will remain a feature as long as human beings want to interact in any next nature that may emerge. Synchronization between human beings and animals, ecosystems and larger technology systems is indispensable for interaction to take place.
Moments to Signify
Part of human existence is that meaning and signification are continuously generated in personal lives and in social structures that emerge through time. Emphasizing specific moments of transformation, of passage of time, highlights the process of time. It helps people to deal with time. Human societies have invented rituals and celebrations for specific moments in time through which meaning emerges for those involved.
Just as nature-time profoundly challenges human existence, so does systems-time.
In personal lives signifying moments play an important role. Be it a private experience of becoming aware, or a collective celebration in which one partakes, these signifying moments produce identity and are fundamental for cultures to survive. Through orchestrating signifying moments, shared experience emerges and offers participants a perspective on their individual position in context of the biological, ecological, technological or social whole. In offering a perspective, it also produces this perspective, which is how cultures emerge and design at the same time. Creating ‘moments to signify’ is needed to create commitment for those involved (8) People need to share experience for ideas to become sustainable and materialize in the real world.
Special signifying moments offer unanticipated impact. In situations of trauma and tragedy the human mind accelerates. When bearing witness to moments of trauma, human beings dramatize to communicate impact (9). In these traumatic ‘imaginative’ moments inner-time dominates perception. Stories of trauma may even include perceptions of experiences that never took place. However, they reveal an inner experience of impact that needs to be signified to be able to communicate. Signifying moments are necessary for meaning to emerge. Offering a shared experience and/or offering an intense personal experience, they are fundamental for cultures to sustain. Any next nature that includes human life will be faced with the human need to signify. Moments to share the process of signification can be designed or will emerge. In these moments human inner time interacts deeply with surrounding rhythms and shapes culture.
Duration of Engagement
One’s short-lived presence on Facebook can be as authentic as a real-life land ownership spanning 80 years (10). Where authenticity used to be a property of being in one place for long stretches of time, in today’s world this notion is replaced by being engaged in an activity for specific durations of time. Duration of engagement qualifies participation, validates contributions and therefore deeply influences human lives. Consequentially, it is not enough to be just present any more. Individuals need to prove existence by constantly transacting (7). The formulation of ‘duration of engagement’ stresses the fact that there is a beginning and an end to activity. From simple time designs to more complex situations in which time emerges, people have to adapt to beginnings and endings continuously, just as birth and death are fundamental to human existence.
For human beings the transformation between the start and end of engagement is crucial to their well-being because it generates ‘empty time’ in between. In empty time, whether one is bored or not, feelings, emotions and a different thinking surface and human presence emerges. When such empty time is not granted, as in the Global Service Delivery model in the outsourcing industry in India in which people are monitored 24 hours a day, human beings’ well-being is seriously jeopardized (11). To generate empty time, robust structures of time design are needed (12). Only in moments of empty time can people experience the situation they are in and act on their well-being.
Communities of Practice
When accepting the proposition that recognizing spatiotemporal trajectories of other beings is fundamental to the ability to share concepts and develop language, any next nature that includes human presence will have to facilitate this recognition. In current nature, systems-time is especially challenging to the human mind. Its scale and speed can only be partially perceived and it does not seem to have a rhythm of its own. Human beings find solutions to integrate it anyway, but it is not a given that people will be endlessly capable of doing this. If next nature includes human presence it has to take into account that human beings integrate their own rhythm with the environment, synchronize performance of presence to be able to communicate and create moments to signify. Thus meaning emerges. Meaning in turn needs specific durations of engagement, with a beginning and an end, and has to include empty time to sustain human well-being and survival.
In the tension between emergence and design, human presence in past, current and next natures is shaped. The experience of time influences the experience of place, how we relate to each other and our scope of possible actions. Any next nature will also be defined by its time design in which integrating rhythm, synchronizing performance, moments to signify and duration of engagement will define how human beings will be able to create communities of practice in which concepts, language, social structures and cultures will emerge.
Photo from Curious Expeditions on Flickr.
REFERENCES
1. KUHN, THOMAS S. 2000. THE ROAD SINCE STRUCTURE, PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS, 1970–1993, WITH AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTERVIEW, EDS. JAMES CONANT AND JOHN HAUGELAND. CHICAGO: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
2 WILSON, REBEKAH. 2008. WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, INTERVIEWS BY CAROLINE NEVEJAN CONDUCTED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & NL NET). HTTP://WWW.
SYSTEMSDESIGN.TBM.TUDELFT.NL/WITNESS/INTERVIEWS/RW/INTERVIEW-RW.HTML (ACCESSED 21-06-2010)
3 OLIVER, KELLY. 2001. WITNESSING, BEYOND RECOGNITION. MINNEAPOLIS/LONDON: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS.
4 BRAZIER, F. & VEER, G.VAN DER. 2009. “INTERACTIVE DISTRIBUTED AND NETWORKED AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS: DELEGATION PARTICIPATION”. WORKSHOP PAPER ACCEPTED BY THE WORKSHOP HUMAN INTERACTION WITH INTELLIGENT & NETWORKED SYSTEMS, ORGANIZED BY THE 2009 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT USER INTERFACES, SANIBEL ISLAND, FLORIDA. (HTTP://WWW.IIDS.ORG)
5 KUMAR, SIRISH. PERFORMANCE AND THE FUTURE OF BROADCAST MEDIA LAB, PERFORMING ARTS LABS, UK. HTTP://WWW.PALLABS.ORG/PORTFOLIO/TIMELINE/MAY_2001_PERFORMANCE_AND_THE_FUTURE_OF_BROADCAST_MEDIA_LAB/ (ACCESSED 21 JUNE 2010)
6 GILL, S.T., KAWAMORI M. KATAGIRI W, SHIMOGIMA A. 2000. “THE ROLE OF BODY MOVES IN DIALOGUE”. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION (RASK), VOLUME 12 PAGES 89-114.
7 ABRAHAM, SUNIL. 2008. WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, INTERVIEWS BY CAROLINE NEVEJAN CONDUCTED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & NL NET). HTTP://WWW.SYSTEMSDESIGN.TBM.TUDELFT.NL/WITNESS/INTERVIEWS/SA/INTERVIEW-SA.HTML (ACCESSED 21-06-2010)
8 SOLOMON, DEBRA. 2009. COLLABORATING IN A COMMUNITY: ARTWORK DEVELOPED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & THE NETHERLANDS FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE). HTTP://WITNESS.BEING-HERE.NET/PAGE/2112/EN (ACCESSED 21-06-2010)
9 OPHUIS, RONALD. 2009. METHODS FOR PAINTING. ARTWORK DEVELOPED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & THE NETHERLANDS FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE). HTTP://WITNESS.BEING-HERE.NET/PAGE/2110/EN (ACCESSED 21 JUNE 2010).
10 HAZRA, ABHISHEK. 2008. WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, INTERVIEWS BY CAROLINE NEVEJAN CONDUCTED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & NL NET). HTTP://WWW.SYSTEMSDESIGN.TBM.TUDELFT.NL/WITNESS/INTERVIEWS/AH/INTERVIEW-AH.HTML (ACCESSED 21-06-2010)
11 ILAVARASAN, P.VIGNESWARA. 2008. “SOFTWARE WORK IN INDIA: A LABOUR PROCESS VIEW”. AN OUTPOST OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY, WORK AND WORKERS IN INDIA’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY, EDS. CAROL UPADHYA AND A.R.VASAVI. NEW DELHI: ROUTLEDGE.
12 FEIGL ZORO. 2009. MOVEMENT THROUGH TIME. ARTWORK DEVELOPED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & THE NETHERLANDS FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE)
January 25 2012
Greetings from the Ohio Turnpike
Apparently freeways have obtained a level of nostalgia that they are now suitable objects to be depicted on postcards (speaking of nostalgic objects). Perhaps one day in the future, freeways will be remembered as the fossils of a society dominated by auto-mobility. Peculiar image of the week.
January 24 2012
Dumpster Fish the Future of Farming
Cities have seen guerilla gardens, rooftop honey production, and fire escape chicken coops. Now, urban farmers may be adding aquaculture to the mix. Headed by ex-banker Christopher Toole, the Society for Aquaponic Values and Education in the Bronx, New York, raises tilapia in tanks and trashcans. Closed recirculating systems use the waste from the fish to fertilize herbs like mint and basil. Toole and his girlfriend and partner, Anya Pozdeeva, envision a future where neighborhood fish like “Bronx Best Blue Tilapia” become a thriving local industry.
Efforts from Toole and other New York tilapia pioneers like NYU professor Martin P. Schreibman may represent the future of fish. As cities grow, and wild fish stocks dwindle to near-depletion by 2050, the urban production of hardy, freshwater species like the tilapia could be a sustainable way for city-dwellers to have their fish and eat it too. Urban aquaculture faces some steep hurdles before becoming a profitable venture. Similar small-scale city fish farms have flopped over costs and lack of demand. However, there is one bright spot: In China, which has practiced fish farming since 2,000 BC, indoor recirculating aquaculture is doing a booming business.
Photo via Blue Ridge Aquaculture.
January 21 2012
Rule #7: Respect Social Standards
Part 7 of the 11 part series Golden Rules of Anthropomorphism and Design.
Anthropomorphic products enter the human social space. Humans have the most complex social behavior of any organism on Earth. Anyone or anything trying to join in should be careful to do it right. Although an anthropomorphic product may function perfectly, if it crosses social boundaries it will still tick people off. This can cause the product to become a social reject, which won’t do sales much good. Luckily, it’s not hard to figure out why things go wrong. Imagine a scenario where a person and a product interact, then replace the product with a second person. If the actions of the second person and the product don’t match up, then there’s something off about the product’s design.
Image via Anvari. For other parts in the series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6.
January 09 2012
A Fake Sun for Your 25/7 Life
The earth operates on a 24 hour cycle, and so do humans. For most of history, we didn’t have much choice in the matter. However, in the absence of visual cues light sunlight, some research indicates that humans naturally stick to a 25 hour schedule. So why rely on the earth’s rotation to order our lives?
I-Weather is a website and app that cycles through blue and orange light for a period of 25 hours, 40 minutes and 7 seconds. The blue ‘day’ suppresses the hormone melatonin and promotes wakefulness. The orange ‘night’ has no impact on melatonin or other hormones, allowing users to work or to drift off as they please. I-Weather acts like an online sun,”creating the world’s first artificial climate to satisfy the metabolic and physiological requirements of a human being in an environment partially or completely removed from earthly influences.” It’s good for travelers, insomniacs, and anyone with a grudge against sunlight.
For a more practical way to regulate your circadian rhythms, check out F.lux.
December 18 2011
Hiking in Hypernature
An escalator to the top of the hill, for people who like nature but don’t like to hike. This photo was taken at the Montjuïc in Barcelona two years ago. Peculiar image of the week. See the original photo here.
December 05 2011
Growing Cement like Coral
Corals are the master builders of the animal kingdom. Powered on plankton and their symbiotic algae, hard corals extract the carbon dissolved in seawater and turn it into their calcium carbonate skeletons. Now a company is trying to replicate this process, not to grow reefs, but to create cement.
Cement, though it may seem like a neutral material, is a massive source of carbon emissions. The cement industry is responsible for 5% of global carbon emissions, with each ton of cement producing a ton of CO2. Biomineralization expert Brent Constantz hopes to green the production of cement by capturing flue gases from factories, running them through a saline solution, and using electricity to convert the gases into solids. For 542 million years, corals have been sequestering carbon dissolved in water. Constantz’s company Calera may have figured out how to do the same on a much shorter time scale.
Story via Fast Company. Image via Jurvetson.
November 22 2011
Augmented Cat beats Dog
Click here to view the embedded video.
Normally a house cat would not stand a chance against a dangerous pit-bull dog. But with a little help of an electric vacuum cleaning robot, supersmart cat Max-Arthur emancipates himself from its presumed fate. Don’t you just love it when old nature and nextnature come together?!
November 17 2011
Flap to Freedom
It works like this. Position yourself with a friend in front of a battery hen and flap your arms as fast as you can when the music sets in. The harder you flap the faster your bird will move towards a hole in the chain fence – which means freedom!
This installation was displayed at the Village Fete at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where young British designers show their talents. One of them, the creator of Flap to Freedom, is Chris O’Shea, an artist and designer who uses technology to create interactive environments.
O’Shea’s work shows that machines and technology can respond to human needs in a fun and playful way. However, Flap to Freedom doesn’t work like a rollercoaster or DVD player. Through the interaction emerges a certain connection between human and machine that could change our perception of them. It stands in the tradition of Philippe Starck’s design, which is intended to give the object a place in the human environment. The device becomes our companion and colleague.
Watch the video here.
November 04 2011
Mushrooms in the Mokum
Mediamatic is hosting a pop-up urban mushroom farm in the middle of Amsterdam. Rows and rows of shiitake, oyster, and the elusive almond-flavored Agaricus subrufescens are sprouting on metal shelves. With its experimental vibe, Paddestoelen Paradijs (Mushroom Paradise) proves that mushrooms might just be our best friends in the age of resource scarcity. They grow off dead, decaying, and often discarded organic matter, are low emission, and their roots can produce a material that’s stronger than wood, as light as packing foam, and completely biodegradable.
Click through to see a living wall, the Christian mushroom cult, and Philosopher’s Stones.
French artist Michel Blazy slathered a wall with a ‘cement’ of tomato paste and powdered potato flakes. After a few weeks of benign cultivation, the red wall is beginning to show signs of green, fluffy life. Soon the entire space will be covered with the kind of mold that normally makes us go “ew,” not “interesting.”
Humans and fungi have a long shared history, and not just because mushrooms taste really great in cream sauce. Some have theorized, with varying degrees of believability, that Christianity began as a psychedelic mushroom cult. Richard Doyle, previously featured on Next Nature, is granddaddy of this field for his belief that psychotropic substances spurred the evolution of the human mind.
Of course, no exhibit on mushrooms would be complete without some live, psychedelic versions. Here, Sclerotia tampanensis is growing next to some harmless but inedible turkeytail mushrooms. The Mediamatic staff is quick to emphasize that while mushrooms are certainly interesting as recreational substances, they’re far more useful as the food, medicines, and building materials of the future.
Paddestoelen Paradijs runs through November 27.
October 09 2011
So thats where blackberries come from
Peculiar image of the week, by Arnoud van den Heuvel.
Related: Children’s dictionary dumps ‘nature’ words, Crackberry addicts are suing their employers, handset gets taken to the grave.
October 06 2011
Steve Jobs 1955 -2011
Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO, passed away on Wednesday October 5th after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Technology conceived from his vision has changed the world dramatically over the past 14 years. He kissed the snake; we ate the fruit. The Next Nature garden has entered a new era.
image source
August 26 2011
Why Handwriting Must Die
Associate professor Anne Trubek argues that handwriting will soon be history, because writing words by hand is a technology that’s just too slow for our times, and our minds. A copy-paste summary from her essay:
“Handwriting has been around for just 6,000 of humanity’s some 200,000 years. Its effects have been enormous, of course: It alters the brain, changes with civilizations, cultures and factions, and plays a role in religious and political battles.”
“Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it. There is no genetic basis for writing. Writing is not like seeing or talking, which are innate. Writing must be taught.”
“Proclaiming the virtuousness of one way of forming a “j” over others is a trope that occurs throughout handwriting’s history. For instance, early Christians jettisoned Roman scripts they deemed decadent and pagan. ”
“In the American colonies, a “good hand” became a sign of class and intelligence as well as moral righteousness.”
“Only wealthy men and businessmen learned to write.”
“It was not until the beginning of the 19th century — a scant 200 years ago — that schooling became universal. Then, handwriting was finally taught to American schoolchildren.”
“For many, the prospect of handwriting dying out would signal the end of individualism and the entree to some robotic techno-future. But when we worry about losing our individuality, we are likely misremembering our schooling, which included rote, rigid lessons in handwriting. We have long been taught the “right” way to form letters.”
“It took the printing press to create a notion of handwriting as a sign of self.”
“Handwriting slowly became a form of self-expression when it ceased to be the primary mode of written communication.”
“When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.”
“Typing in school has a democratizing effect, as did the typewriter. It levels the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage.”
“The moral of the story is that what we want from writing is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. ”
“A system that can become streamlined through specialization and automaticity has more time to think.”
“This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think.”
“When people hear I am writing about the possible end of handwriting, many come up with examples of things we will always need handwriting for: endorsing checks (no longer needed at an ATM), grocery lists (smartphones have note-taking functions), signatures (not even needed to file taxes anymore). These will not be what we would lose. We may, however, forsake some neurological memory. I imagine some pathways in our brains will atrophy.”
“Then again, I imagine my brain is developing new cognitive pathways each time I hit control C or double click Firefox. That I can touch-type, my fingers magically dancing on my keyboard, free of any conscious effort (much as you are looking at letters and making meaning in your head right now as you read), amazes me. Touch-typing is a glorious example of cognitive automaticity, the speed of execution keeping pace with the speed of cognition.”
“Do not worry. It will take a long time for handwriting to die, for us to have the interview with the “last handwriter” as we do today with the last living speakers of some languages. Even the revolutionary Greeks took a long time to change habits. After they created the Greek alphabet, they spent 400 years doing nothing with it, preferring their extant oral culture. Handwriting is not going anywhere soon. But it is going.”
Read the entire essay.
Related Your grand-grand-parents new media, New Media 80.000 BC, Turning Brain waves into tweets. Via Anne.
August 24 2011
Woodplastics
Looking for a new kitchen counter-top, but can’t decide between a natural or an artificial material? Soon you might be getting both.
Designer Hironori Yoshida is pioneering hybrids of wood and plastic – to be used in interior, furniture and product design. His ‘woodplastic’ is created by scanning & laser-cutting the grain patterns in a piece of wood to subsequently replace the gaps with a polyester resin. The result is a marriage of the made & the born.
August 20 2011
Physical Scrollbars
Scrollbars is a series of installations and physical scrollbar-representations created by Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte. According to the artist, most of us consider the scrollbar to be a virtual object – but in use it triggers reactions such as frustration, which suggests a subconscious acceptance of the inherent “reality” of these objects.
July 19 2011
Streetlight Trees
We all know the cellphone masts disguised as trees, created in an attempt to blend technology within the ‘natural’ landscape. Now Taiwanese scientists have created trees that could function as streetlights. They infused the leaves of Bacopa Caroliniana with gold nanoparticles which causes the chlorophyll to produce a reddish luminescence. This phenomenon is awkwardly named bio-LED by the scientists.
According to Yen Hsun Su of the Academia Sinicia and the National Cheng Kun Univerisity: ‘The bio-LED could be used to make roadside trees luminescent at night. This will save energy and absorb CO2 as the bio-LED luminescence will cause the chloroplast to conduct photosynthesis,’ This means that while the tree is ‘lit’ more CO2 is consumed from the atmosphere, therefore the glowing trees could reduce carbon emission, cut electricity costs while still lighting streets safely.
June 08 2011
The Sound of the Blue Canary
Blue is a beautiful color, but its sound is simply irresistible. It is the song of the unhappy and the depressed. It is a sound that touches people. It was also the sound of a little songbird, the Serinus Canaria Domestica, a sound that so moved me, I was led on a voyage of discovery into the world of birdsong. The Serinus Canaria Domestica is the man-made descendant of the Wild Canary, a finch originally from the Canary Islands, which nowadays exists in many different breeds. This essay deals with the cultivation of the song-bred canary and imagines how its story might lend inspiration to the sound design of electric cars.
By BERRY EGGEN
Sounds ‘exist in time and over space’ [1]. You can hear a sound without having to face the source that produces it; you only have to be listening or recording at the right time. If you want to see an object, however, you have to be facing it. And, in most cases, you can re-view the object at different moments and for longer periods; visual objects therefore ‘exist in space and over time’.
When you are a small bird living in dense foliage, leaves prevent effective visual communication. This makes sound an excellent alternative for warning or impressing your mates, or for marking out your territory. The volatile character of sound, however, makes its evolutionary development difficult to trace, whether it be birdsong or vocal communication in animals in general. We know from visual fossil inspection, for example, that there was a close relationship between dinosaurs and birds [2]. At the same time, though we have a sense of what dinosaurs looked like, we can only imagine their vocal expressions today.
In On the Origin of Species, Darwin explains how adapting to changing conditions in the natural environment results in survival for some living organisms and extinction for others. Biologists have discovered that this principle of ‘natural selection’ not only causes species to develop subspecies with very different characteristics that are determined by heredity, but also lies at the basis of the origin of new species [3]. The Domesticated Canary is a subspecies of the Wild Canary and contains a wide variety of breeds that have not been scientifically classified. The origin of these (new) breeds is a result of ‘human selection.’ But what exactly does this ‘human selection’ principle entail? And can this principle inspire, or maybe even guide, the sound design of next nature? Before focusing on what comes ‘Next’, I will briefly review the ‘Current’ ground of Nature’s infinite design space as cultivated by human breeders of the species: Canaria.
Nowadays, three main groups of domesticated canaries can be distinguished: posture, color, and song canaries. The various breeds within these groups show a wide variety of different shapes (small, big, curved, bowed, curly-feathered, crested, and more…) and colors (green, yellow, red, brown, white, orange, gray, and more…, though no blue!). The song canary group comprises different breeds with clearly distinguishable songs. Unfortunately, the richness and uniqueness of these different songs cannot be captured in words; a ‘sound’ description would take pages! For now, I will introduce two of the most familiar breeds of this group: the Harz Roller (a.k.a. the German Roller) and the Waterslager (a.k.a. the Malinois).
The song of the Harz Roller canary was cultivated in the Harz Mountains in Germany, whereas the Waterslager originates in Belgium. The melancholy song of the Harz Roller is characterized by relatively slow, nostalgic, soft accents as compared to the jubilant song of the Waterslager, which has a more animated rhythm with sound segments (tours) that are more individually distinct [4]. Although these song-bred canaries sound very different from each other, the Wild Canary is their shared ancestor. What selection principles were involved in the breeding of these distinct songbirds?
To answer this question, we will assume the vantage points of the range of actors involved in the evolutionary process. The male bird is the lead character—he’s on lead vocals. He’s the only one that sings; female canaries, and female birds in general, do not sing. And he had better sing well (!), to impress the female canary, create a bond, and bring about a successful mating. In our case, however, the act of singing clearly goes beyond the mating function: the male bird not only has to please the female bird, but the human breeder as well. Unbeknownst to the male bird, it is ultimately the breeder who decides for or against the composition of a possible breeding pair based on the song qualities of the male bird.
However, there is an important difference: the breeder’s (= human) selection criteria predominantly relate to the aesthetic qualities of birdsong, whereas the functional qualities of the song of the male bird seem to dominate natural selection principles. Female birds judge a male bird’s physical fitness for reproduction on his vocal performance. Yet any person who has ever listened to the varied, beautifully nuanced, and apparently improvised phrases performed by a solitary songbird with no other birds in its direct vicinity might seriously wonder whether reproduction is the only intrinsic motivation for birds to sing [5]. The third principal actor is the female bird. She not only has to be susceptible to the male’s singing courtship behavior, but she should also supply a good genetic blueprint for nesting behavior, as this is what determines the actual offspring produced in any generation.
In the case of the Harz Roller and Waterslager breeds, breeders’ opinions about what made the perfect canary song differed sharply. The Harz Roller breeders preferred low, smooth, rolled sounds above shrill, noisy sounds, leading to the calm, melodic song of the Harz Roller as it is known today. For the breeders of the Waterslager canary, on the other hand, the song of the Nightingale was the model to emulate. This led to the interrupted, boiling and rolling water beats and metallic tone qualities that characterize today’s Waterslager song. Already in the nineteenth century, breeders organized clubs to share knowledge and to hold song contests. Standards of song quality were first established within these clubs, and eventually led to worldwide standards describing the various song tours and their ideal qualities.
Scientists have recently discovered [6] that these canary breeds differ with respect to hearing sensitivity for high-frequency sounds. Waterslager canaries show impaired hearing in the frequency range in which their vocalizations contain the most energy. In other words, in order to contact a ‘hard-of-hearing’ female, a male Waterslager has to produce louder sounds. This finding demonstrates that the non-singing female birds have an equally important role in the evolutionary emergence of new song-bred canaries. At this point, the case of the Serinus Canaria Domestica has been introduced in sufficient detail to address the main question of this essay: how can the cultivation of traditional nature inspire Next Nature’s sound design? For this purpose, and as a hypothetical example, I will consider a challenge currently faced by car manufacturers—sound design for electric cars.
Car manufacturers have known for quite some time that the sounds their cars produce need to be explicitly designed. While the functional quality of car sounds guarantees skilled and safe driving, their subjective qualities are crucial to the driver’s overall experience, as well as the car company’s brand image. Consider the subjective associations of a car door slamming or an accelerating car engine. A car that does not produce (the right) sounds has the same effect on the driver’s experience as a silent movie played on a full-blown, state-of-the-art home theatre system.
By mapping the lead characters of the song-canary case directly onto the stakeholders involved in the sound design of future electric cars, some intriguing new interactions immediately pop out. The car (male bird) produces the sounds that will impress and seduce its future owner (female bird) into purchasing.
The sound designer or car manufacturer (breeder) decides which car and corresponding sound set best matches a particular customer segment. This may sound like common practice, but songbirds and their ‘designers’ do things differently. First of all, their songs are dynamic and adapt gradually to the changing environment. Moreover, as we have seen, cultivated birdsong goes beyond the functional, and the aesthetics of expression are at the heart of its being. For future electric cars, this could mean that the basic ‘brand specific’ sound synthesis algorithms and the type of sounds they are able to generate will still be defined by the car manufacturer, but that individual cars may be able to learn sounds and adapt them to their own environments and driver preferences. In this scenario, a Ferrari will always sound like a Ferrari, but a Ferrari from the countryside will easily betray its origin by sounding completely different than an urban-raised Ferrari. More ‘open’ futuristic scenarios would allow any car to disguise itself as a Ferrari sound-alike [7], or even audiomorph into a Batmobile destined to break the sound barrier.
Other adaptive schemes could breed ‘cars with personalities.’ A future car, for example, could adapt its sound to its owner’s driving style, or sonically radiate the driver’s personality traits. Such sonifications would enable drivers and their environments to become aware of behaviors which, if desirable, could boost self-esteem or, in the case of unwanted behaviors, could motivate for behavioral change. And what about car-driver units synchronizing their sounds to those of other car-driver units, much like cicadas sometimes synchronize their songs, or as song-canaries have been trained to sing in pairs or in groups of four? Such emergent phenomena could create positive feelings of being connected and, at the same time, improve traffic flow.
Many more scenarios could be envisioned, but the most important challenge remains to create the right conditions for an ecosystem to emerge in which all stakeholders (car manufacturers, intelligent cars (!) and car drivers) will be able to freely explore the opportunities offered by sound. As we have learned from the case of the song-bred canary, these explorations need to be determined by interactions between the various stakeholders. The conditions for interaction need to be defined properly in order for this kind of evolution to thrive—one in which brand-specific sound sets simultaneously reflect the personal preferences shaping the driver-car relationship. Only then will there be a chance that one day, at daybreak, I will be moved again, this time by the sad song of a lonely abandoned car, subtly standing out from the peaceful dawn chorus in my backyard.
References
[1] Gaver, W.W. (1989). The Sonic Finder: An interface that uses auditory icons. Human-Computer Interaction, 4 (1), 67-94, 1989.
[2] Ruben, J. (20 10). Paleobiology and the origins of avian flight. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 2733-2734, 2010. 2010; or for a popular summary see: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100209183335.htm
[3] Orr, H.A. (2009). Testing Natural Selection. Scientific American 300, 30-37, 2009.
[4] World Confederation of Ornithology: Song Standard of the Waterslager/Malinois Canary. http://www.westernwaterslager.com/text/Articles/SongStandards/COM/COMStd.htm retrieved on 02-09-2010.
[5] Rothenberg, D. (2005). Why Birds Sing – One Man’s Quest to Solve an Everyday Mystery. Penguin, Allen Lane, Great Britain. 978-0-713-99829-6; also see accompanying website: www.whybirdssing.com retrieved on 02-09-2010.
[6] Okanoya, K., Dooling, R.J. and Downing, J.D. (1990). Hearing and vocalizations in hybrid Waterslager-Roller canaries (Serinus canarius). Hearing Research, 46, 271-276.
[7] Hukar Ozyasar (2010). How to make my car sound like a Ferrari. http://www.ehow.com/how_6576564_make-car-sound-like-ferrari.html retrieved 21-10-2010.
June 06 2011
Natural Car Alarms
Click here to view the embedded video.
While hiking in Trinidad, artist Nina Katchadourian was struck by the similarity of bird calls to car alarms. One inspires us to poetry, the other makes us groan and pull the pillow over our ears at night, but they’re both forms of auditory pollution.
Back in New York, Katchadourian fitted a ‘flock’ of three cars with recorded bird calls to mimic to the six-tone siren that echoes constantly through the city. Far from sounding like a bucolic forest, a ‘natural’ car alarm is just as rattling and irritating as the real thing. Not only is real nature not green, it’s downright annoying.
May 29 2011
Games become punishment: Gold farming in prison
Remember the gold farmers in China who put in eye-straining hours to earn virtual money in World of Warcraft? Gold farming has now made the leap to the country’s corrupt penal system. Along with back-breaking physical labor and manufacturing work in Chinese labour camps, some prisoners are forced to play massively multiplayer online games to accrue in-game credits. Inmates work in 12 hour shifts, and are beaten or tortured if they fall behind their quotas for the day. The virtual ‘gold’ is sold to players around the world eager to move ahead in the game. After games became jobs, it was inevitable that games would also become punishment.
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