by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2012-09-23 01:08:44 UTC
Toyota has unveiled a new assistant robot designed to help the disabled live more independently. Called the Human Support Robot (HSR), it represents the latest initiative in Toyota's Partner Robot program and is intended to help out around the home by fetching things, opening curtains, and picking up objects from the floor or atop tables and high counters thanks to its single arm and telescopic body. .. Continue Reading Toyota unveils helpful Human Support Robot
by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2012-09-24 15:18:28 UTC
The German Vegetarian Society (VEBU), in conjunction with the natural cosmetics company Sante, has developed an organic vitamin B12-enriched toothpaste whose efficacy has been confirmed by test results presented in Germany earlier this month. This is good news for vegans and aging people who are more likely to suffer from vitamin B12 deficiency... Continue Reading B12 toothpaste makes vegans smile
You’ve seen tile that looks like a wood plank, and here’s a similar kind of variation on a theme: wood in the shape of a brick. Barnwood Bricks is a patented line of hardwood flooring and cladding products made from reclaimed wood in Tennessee. The bricks install kind of like tile with a special glue and grouting system. They are available in three basic dimensions — 4″ x 8″, 5″ x 10″, and 6″ x 12″ — and thicknesses — 3/4″, 5/8″, and 1/2″ — with available wood types of pine, oak, poplar, cherry, walnut, and chestnut. Contact Barnwood Bricks with square footage/dimensions for a quote.
This is part two of a three-part series written by the judges of the upcoming Interaction Design Awards--Ed.
The gentle sea breeze tickles your face as the sun ripples off a perfect blue ocean. Lazing by the shores of a tiny island, deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you are enjoying a quiet holiday. Nothing out of the ordinary--except that this island might have been forged entirely from waste plastic found buried in the depths of our oceans, fabricated not by humans but genetically modified plastic-eating bacteria.
This unthinkable idea has its roots in a proposal for the iGEM competition by a team of teenage students at UCL. They are looking to find genes from organisms that have plastic degradation properties, and then insert them into marine bacteria. If they succeed, these new plastic-eating marine bacteria could be a “natural” solution for the millions of tons of tiny bits of plastic floating in our oceans. They could then become microscopic construction workers, building artificial plastic islands.
The UCL team is one of the 193 student teams from around the world participating in iGEM, the Olympics of synthetic biology. Using a selection of DNA-encoding elements from an online registry combined with biological parts they design, participants assemble new biological systems in a Lego-like fashion, and then operate them in living cells. The resulting data and DNA strands are submitted as biobricks to the registry, and winners are decided on the basis of the number of biobricks submitted.
Typically, these biobrick projects explore the ways in which DNA strains of bacteria or yeast can be manipulated to express desired traits--for example, to glow green in the presence of explosives or change color to detect pollutants in water. Over the past few years, the registry has grown to host a collection of biobricks containing DNA to turn microbes into sensors for measuring environmental pollution, disease monitoring, arsenic sensing, and more. Beyond these relatively small-scale experiments, the promise of synthetic biology lies in its potential to radically change the conversation around climate change and health care by engineering new kinds of biofuels, vaccines, and antibiotics.
There are parallels between this structured approach to designing living organisms and the neat, organized world of engineering. The techniques and materials to “edit, design, and build” living organisms will become more accessible, just as Arduino and software today, making interaction design open to anyone. But with the electronic hardware, the inputs and outputs are generally predictable. Plug in an Arduino, add a sensor, and write some code, and the LED will blink. But living systems are capricious: They adapt to context, display random behavior, and most important, mutate into forms that are not always predictable. You are never in control. Epigenetic expression means we might never fully understand what the “mutated products” will look like; any attempt to deal with such uncertainty requires a more deliberate, thoughtful, and critical approach--and that’s where interaction designers come in.
Interaction designers today specialize in understanding the promises of technology. They create blueprints for its applications. What happens when DNA becomes our new material and organisms become “apps”?
Designers all over the world have started playing in this space already, but of particular interest are a series of projects by graduates at my alma mater, the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art. James King and Daisy Ginsberg teamed up with the Cambridge iGEM team to engineer E.coli bacteria into living, color-coded sensors that would live in your gut and give you an early-warning signal for an oncoming illness by turning your poop a certain color. David Benque created a fantastical acoustic gardenhttp://www.davidbenque.com/projects/acoustic-botany, a controlled entertainment ecosystem to illustrate our cultural and aesthetic relationship to nature through beautiful soundscapes.
As a contrast to the more shiny worlds of white labs, chrome, and skyscrapers of most futuristic visions, Tobias Revell explores a more plausible future with synthetic biology in his project titled New Mumbai, in which he imagines residents of Mumbai slums adapting fungal biotechnology to generate power for their homes and secure their energy independence from local government.
There is also an opportunity for us designers to address the ethical and legal conundrums that synthetic biology and biotechnology create. We are already awash in stories of companies like Myriad Genetics seeking to patent genes that they “discover.” Who owns our genes? Who can patent them? Will we have patented children? And is there a new opportunity for a deviant entrepreneur to step in and sell “pirated genes” for those who cannot afford to get the patented alternatives? How would health care models adapt to these new changes? Ultimately, how will we value human life?
In a project titled Genetic Stock at our studio Superflux, we are exploring a world in which genome sequencing, profiling, and modification have become the norm. The algorithm that we are currently designing calculates insurance premium costs based on specific gene combinations and their associated risks. Over the coming weeks, we will develop scenarios and prototypes to understand what that would mean not only to our health care models but also taxation and welfare structures.
Such propositions are opening up a new space for design that is both exciting and necessary. The emerging narratives and artifacts tell compelling stories around humanizing a technology that might seem consigned to the far future, but is in fact very much part of our lives today. As the biobrick registry gets bigger, as more and more DIY bio labs spring up across the globe, as DARPA invests millions of dollars in furthering research, as corporations get ambitious, these projects become less wildly speculative and more like wireframes, a traditional design mockup. By working with and alongside scientists, technologists, ethicists, and economists, we can create a new cultural understanding of living designs that ensures the presence of important critical and ethical perspectives.
I write this post in my capacity as a jury member of the IxDA awards this year, musing over the fascinating categories for this year’s awards. Will any such living design project consider applying? What category might it fall under? As the very materials--DNA, plasmids, and proteins--we are made of become the materials for the design of new kinds of living organisms, the entire idea of what it means to be human will be revisited, once again. And this time, interaction designers can take the lead.
For more information on the Interaction Awards or to submit a project, go here. Entry to the competition is open to all companies, individuals, and students until October 1.
DesignJunction 2012 just kicked off at the London Design Festival and already there are tons of crazy-cool designs to sift through. Take this Occupy! Chair created by Dejana Kabiljo, a Vienna-based artist who likes to mix a little fetish into her artistic exploration of human behavior and politics. The chair looks like it offers about a thousand cup holders, by it’s really made from the springs of Yugoslavian military mattresses.
In recent years, the ubiquity of design events and festivals have been met with quiet grumbling from some members of the design industry, criticising the inevitable focus on chairs and the more exhibition friendly facets of design.
It is, perhaps, this tension that design duo Nendo chose to play when commission to produce a piece in the glorious surroundings of the V&A for London Design Festival 2012. Entitled "Mimicry Chairs," the installation spans the length and breadth of the museum, with these strange, fragile and ethereal (completely non-functioning) archetypal chairs, sprouting up everywhere.
The ghost-like objects—crawling up stairs, suspended from ceilings, swarming in gallery spaces—reflecting the museums interior, take on the characteristics of their surroundings—arranging themselves like the regimented paintings on the walls to give just one example.
This week Axor unveiled their latest line of faucets, the Starck Organic collection. Designed by you-know-who, the curvy, branch-like forms were nature inspired and include faucets for sinks, tubs and showers.
You're probably wondering how the heck they work. The top knob controls the temperature, while the spout is actually a second knob that controls the water flow. The assymetrical design seems to favor righties, and splitting up those tasks will seem strange to some of us (including your correspondent), but both Axor and Starck have put heavy philosophy-time into the line (whether or not we think they need it). "The innovative control concept allows us to experience our approach to water more consciously," the company writes--italics theirs.
To build hype for the Organic's launch this week, Axor shot and earlier released some rather...mysterious videos of Starck making abstract references to the product. Here's one of them that had me scratching my head:
by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2012-09-21 03:15:51 UTC
The textile and fashion industries have a huge environmental footprint as their production cycles rely on oil, pesticides, and great amounts of energy and water. For that reason, some companies are looking for new manufacturing methods, including recycling, as a way to mitigate their ecological footprint. One of them is Vapor Apparel, a U.S. company specializing in performance fabrics and digital sublimation printing that is launching a new range of 100 percent recycled fabric during the upcoming EcoPrint show in Berlin, Germany... Continue Reading Vapor Apparel spins trash into sustainable fashion
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-19 10:39:47 UTC
Sprout is a pencil that wants to be a plant when it grows up. When it's too short to use, plant Sprout to grow herbs, flowers and more!. It is a successfully ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-18 06:38:21 UTC
Airdye is a water-less dye process for synthetic fabrics and materials. AirDye technology eliminates hazardous wastewater as a byproduct of dyeing ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-16 08:29:57 UTC
Prabhu Kandachar has been, on and off, working at Delft Technical University for over 20 years. And 10 years at my old company Fokker Aircraft. Mainly ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-14 12:32:49 UTC
Vestergaard Frandsen, established in 1957, is a Europe-based international company specialising in complex emergency response and disease control products. ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-14 08:05:37 UTC
This is one of those products that make you think; "why has it taken so long to get something so obvious on the market?" Hasn't anyone of us burnt ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-13 07:42:06 UTC
In order to effectively manage the sustainability impact, environmental, social and governance (ESG) impacts, of an organisation one needs to and make ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-12 15:55:08 UTC
Many years of research into materials and their limits of resistance have permitted Valcucine to gauge the structures of its products down to the essential ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-11 06:23:22 UTC
Now every drop counts for two. All of the water that falls into the white ceramic of the washbasin follows an exclusive drainage system. Thanks to ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-10 11:03:55 UTC
Effortless staying power. Live life to the full. Even now.
That’s what Rollz is all about. A stylish rollator, a lot more expensive then the standard ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-09-08 07:50:19 UTC
A british aerospace start-up, Acro Aircraft, wanted to develop a product that would bring the aircraft industry significant savings and give themselves ...
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