Paper towels for oil spills: MIT researchers unveil autonomous oil-absorbing robot

MIT researchers unveil autonomous oil-absorbing robot

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The Plenitude of Rich Gold

Some weeks ago I went in a local bookstore just to kill some time , and after take a quick look into the shelves a small green spine cath my attention in the design theorie area (after that I notice that theorie books even when it comes to design, are usually graphically bored). I take it from the shelf and just there another two things call my interest. First, all the cover was illustrated with doodles that looks like made by a school kid -a thing that I found clever in a bookshelf full of elaborated computer renderings- very warm and very beautiful. The second thing was ''foreword by John Maeda'' writen under the autors name, Rich Gold. Then when I went into the book, to my surprise I didn't found any pictures, any renders, any oversimplify diagrams, nothing but words..and CARTOONS! yes cartoons. Every chapter or section starts with a cartoon, and also every main idea on the book is stressed with a cartoon. There is a cartoon to explain the overstuffed enviroment in wich we live that Gold calls ''the plenitude'', there is also a cartoon that show clearly the four disciplines (and professions pursuit by the autor) that have the responsability of around 97% of the plenitude, there is a cartoons to explain the seven path of innovation, the five problems of the Plenitude and the seven solutions for that; and even for explain how the Plenitude of ones is based in the poverty of others.

After been exposed to that amount of quality information two thoughts came to my mind, cartoons rules and I have to reed this book.

The book is about thing, or better say Stuff. What it is, from where it comes, where it goes, how we can deal with it and why we need to be sorrounded by this thing call ''the plenitude'' (after write this post I'm not sure anymore if this book it's really about ''stuff'')

The Plenitude, Creativity, Innovation and Making Stuff

autor: Rich Gold (foreword by John Maeda)

pages:111

the MIT press

Building organs block by block

Building organs block by block
Analogy can go a little bit further than a create a juicer looking like a tin-tin spaceship, and a little bit useful too.
When everybody is thinking in cell printers to do 3D tissues structures -with everybody I don't mean you, me or the next door neighbour, but the biotechnology research community- a guy came with the idea of making bricks out of cells, like legos! and then he call this technique with the awesome name of ''micromasonry''. With this new concept Javier Gomez Fernandez (who has to be someones neighbour)put in every lab the the chance to build this kind of structures without depend on advance motion control technology. Big point for creative thinking in science.

Mirror system, or the empathy mechanism in our brains

Recently I came across with a video that introduces the idea that we have a neuronal mechanism that allows us to share the experience of other people just by look at them or heard them. This mechanism it's call the Mirror System. This neuronal device, that don't depend on any specific brain structure, was first found on monkeys as an unexpected neuronal response when some scientific team in Parma were studying the response of some neural groups related with conscious movement. The exercise was grab a piece of food, when the monkey grab it the neurons ''turn on'', the surprise was when the exactly group of neurons also ''turn on'' when the monkey saw one person of the team grab the food.

That found opens a complete new research branch in neuroscience and until now it has been prove that this system has incidence in motor, sensitive and symbolic system. This means that through the ''mirror system'' it can be trigger motion, sensitive and emotional responses in the subject that look or hear an action. This is why we make funny faces when we see a football player get kick by another, or why movies make us cry.

The mirror system it's the only mechanism that has proven to be fundamentally social, that means that it is a specific device to learn and behave socially. The thing that I see as a relevant issue here is that when you are worried about to understand human behaviour (like Design as a discipline it is) you have to be conscious about the importance of firsthand experience and above all, of observation; because this means that through experience and observe the human behavior you can easily address gestures, emotions and comprehensions that can drive conceptually and formally the develop of a project.

The relevance and functions of the mirror system go, of course, far beyond the field of design and can give us a knowledge greater than confirm a fact well know by experience (observation and firsthand experience are our best tool for design) and it can put us in the real and deep understanding of human behaviour.

more info:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html

What are the discussion on Design by these days?

fig 1

Some days ago I read in WYSIWYW a really interesting and visceral post about Design & Art. This relationship has been discussed (above all in design schools, I have never hear an artist say a word about that) since the beginning of the design as a discipline, and to be honest I’m quite tired of hear arguments going in both ways, and I agree when the people from ''Sindicato de la Imagen'' says Art is Art and Design is Design, get over, don't lose more time in nonsense.

But this closure leaves us another question: what is the discussion in design by these days? And, what are the topics of that discussion?

Design, as any other consolidated discipline, has several components that converge to give substance to his theoretical and practical body: Methodology, Ethics, Technical issues, Aesthetics, Relation with the industry, Connection with other disciplines and Cultural relevance, just for say some. All these components can also be analyze by them self to find new areas to debate and to extract polar concept that define the extension of the discussion. For example, if we look the arguments in Methodology we can find ''Design thinking'' as one of the mayor driver of the praxis by these days, but also we can find ''Problem solving'' (coming from engineering) as one of the most common approaches to design. In other areas like Aesthetics polar concepts can be a little more diffuse, and they can go from naturalism (Bouroullec) to new rationalism (Lehanneur), from the nostalgia (Hayon) to the material and structural efficiency (Grcic) (fig 1).

In the same way of analysis we can find polar concept in Ethics. Today in design every day we can contrast the Super luxury -of cars, yachts, interiors, electronics, high-end audio systems, clothes, watches and almost a endless list of product focus on give pleasure and social relevance to his owners- with product and projects focus on solving social issues like education (OLXC), Health (Lifestraw), shelter ( rectionhousingsystem), energy ( ceramic jiko). Social focus has permeated design even further than poverty issues to address health and social behaviors in the developed world (NYC Condom).

The word Design its use today almost as a synonym of innovation, and in this relationship lays the Cultural relevance of design. As material culture dynamo, Design has the responsibility to innovate, but innovation can also be decompose in the polar concepts of Incremental Innovation and Conceptual Innovation. The difference lies in if the innovation comes to improve something that already exists (incremental) or introduces a new way to achieve a desire effect. For example you can design a new washing machine in which you can wash color and white clothes at the same time without worry about the white clothes get stained in the process, which would be a really good improvement in washing. That would be an incremental innovation. But if you make yourself the question: why do we need a big and complex machine to wash our clothes? Or even better, why do we need water to wash our clothes? You can find some new ideas on how to clean the clothes that can drive you to develop new objects and process of cleaning, which would be a conceptual break through, a conceptual innovation. The main difference between this two ways of innovate is the physical product of them. In incremental innovation the most of the cases ends in a new variation of a pre-existing product (like a better washing machine), but the product of conceptual innovation usually is a complete new item, that open a new branch on the technological tree (like self cleaning surfaces).

Another big difference between incremental and conceptual innovation it’s the risk level, improve an existing product it’s a safer road than develop something complete new one. But that is a subject of business rather than design, as it is also the scale of the production. Design is –and this it’s my position- in the solution, not in the repetition or the scale of the production.

The discussion on today Design it is a lot bigger than we just talk here, and we have to be aware that this isn’t a light conversation about taste or how improve the business strategy. This is about what to do in a discipline that every day has a more relevant role in society and culture.

This conversation should continue and I think one good introduction is this video where Tim Brow talk about different aspects of Design and Design thinking.

Now we have metal that work as a tree

Recently have been unveiled a piece of metal that can transport water in a vertical way, defying the gravity force, just as trees in nature.

In Nature trees pump water up by a combined mechanism called ''the cohesion-tension theory''. Water travels up by capillarity and a difference in the water potential produced by the transpiration pull.

In Capillarity - or Wicking- the narrow the tube, the highest the column. So, if you have a extremly powerfull laser with the highest frecuency that you can imagine, a Femtosecond, what would you do? of course, the most thinnest tubes ever. That was the idea of Chunlei Guo optics scientist, from the Rochester University.

The potential aplications for this new material goes from microprocessors to clean hydrophobic surfaces...for now(when the paper that describe the process and the material is not even published yet), in the future we will hear, for sure, about more ways to apply the etched-metal.

more information on:

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3387

How to make-and read- a 2.5 billon pixel Milky Way Image

Watch the video with all the explanations

From Art to Science...and back (Reuben Margolin's kinetic sculptures)

First of all, if it is anyone real follow this blog i would like to apologize me for the big time window between this post and the previous one. Now, i find this excelent example of the crossover between art and science. Reuben Margolin translate the physics of waves into the language of art with amazing results, big and complex instalations waving smoothly as a light water perturbation or as the peculiar gait of the caterpillar.

The crossing between Art and Science it's not new, but it is somehow one of the most interesting and revolutionary paths that the Arts is following these days. In the same field of kinetic sculpture we can find the amazing beach animals by Theo Hansen, but also we can count the phylosophical questioning made through hightech-interfaces by Natalie jeremijenko who put in evidence the nature of our relationships with other people, animals, the cities, and so on.

There is a lot of people working now in this area, bringing the concepts of science and using the new technologys to make some reflections about the world on what we live, and they are making amazing things. But also there is a few who follow the opposite path, from science to art, and they are discovering the big power who lies behind the human expression and how these knowledge -intuitive and irrational as usually is - can hold the keys of one of the most complex structures, the human behaviour.

amazing

Pranav Mistry, the invention sense

Pranav Mistry is one of that people that have the abitlity of play with the technology as if it was the most childish of the games. With a background in Computer Science and Design, Pranav Mistry gather together the understanding of the interaction between the people and the digital interfaces and the comprehension on how technology can improve our lives to give birth to some of the most radical devices and interfaces. This one of the guys who is shaping the future human-computer interaction... and it's going open source!!!

Mathieu Lehanneur, object-ivness and user comprehension

Mathieu Lehanneur -French designer- who claims for a Design informed by Science to understand our real needs -like silence- and develop products with wich we can relate, and even achieve symbiotic dependences (for good, fortunately). It's also a good example of new areas for design and the richness that multidisciplinary work brings to design.

http://www.mathieulehanneur.com/

BIOMIMICRY, or the green path of the new technologies

Biomimicry, must be one of the most beatiful word that i learned in last time. It means understand and apply biological principles in human designs. Simple, but not simplistic.

The first time that i heard this word was in a Robert Full talk in TED, where he shows his investigations on Geckos feet, and how he and his team manages to achieve a deep understanding of the mechanic that allow this little lizard to climb glass walls with almost no effort, and - here's the exiting part- develop a sinthetic simulation of this feet that recreate the special habilities of this animal. The incredible amount of work made by Full and his team had big rewards in patents of new materials, applications and designs.

Two of most intereting things -at least for me- were, first the multidisciplinary aproach, mostly in the part of developing the new feet and the bottomline of the talk. In the first one because the complexity of nature demand the integration of the differents sides of sciences and technology to produce holistic understanding and feasable designs. The second, the bottomline ''we most preserve the nature design before they are lost'' this words point to

a new issue in the enviromental crisis that we are living. Nature produce extremly eficient and creative solutions through thousands - if not millions- of years of iterations, solutions that can be lost in a couple of years because the habitats destruction and animal extintion.

Other thing that caught my attention was the Biomimicry as a methodology. As a designer most of the process involve on creation have to do with the interaction between the forms and the enviroments; so, as Christofer Alexander says long ago, we analize the ''surroundings'' of an object (fisical, semantic, perceptive, mechanic, etc) and we propose forms that ''fits'' properly with these surroundings...but what Nature do if it is not that!? I'm not saying that designers are a force of Nature, but the process of design -and with this i mean every process call design- has to do a lot with what Nature do. Multiple and consecutive iterations to

develop a specific form, function or behavior. In this way it is very interesting the example of FESTO, German company who take the concept of Biomimicry to develop Pneumatic Robots who works, looks and behave like real animals.

This robots born from the deep understanding of the motion of these animals, and it is the transference of that understanding of mechanical principles to the design of these pneumatic creatures where lays the relevance of the biomimicry research; the groundbreaking conceptual innovation, in this case, of how mechanical devices can stop to be mechanical devices and become creatures with specific functions, in a product more close to poetry than engineering.

Biomimicry in the form of Biomechanics it isn't new, in every culture we can find examples of how the men build tools based in the observation of nature, but what it is new is put the focus on the materials and behaviors. In the last years the research on how the Nature resolve his more smallest structures combined with the Nanoengineering had resulted in the revolution of the materials industry. But maybe the most promising area of Biomimicry it's the study of the naturals behaviors that can lead to the improvement of the responsiveness of our own enviroment due to the basic principle that the behaviors are modeled by the information that the subject can perceibe. If we can improve our undertanding on how the Nature ''talk'' and interact with him self we can start to design the enviroment it self, not just the material part of it but the way that the enviroment can generate by it self the responses (forms, structures, stimulus, ...)for the immediate needs. An self evolving artificial enviroment.

For now Biomimicry it is at service of the cutting edge technology insdustry, but why not expect that in the future this path also take us to a better comprention of how we can live in Nature and not just above the Nature.

information and source:
http://www.festo.com/cms/de_de/index.htm
http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/1748-3190
http://www.biomimicry.net/
http://www.biomimeticsregistry.net/main.html
http___www.biomimeticsregistry.net_pietrzyk.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimicry

Recomendantion of the week: Why 'Sleeping on It' Helps

By John M. Grohol, PSYD, PsychCentral.com

We're often told, "You should sleep on it" before you make an important decision. Why is that? How does "sleeping on it" help your decision-making process?

Conventional wisdom suggests that by "sleeping on it," we clear our minds and relieve ourselves of the immediacy (and accompanying stress) of making a decision. Sleep also helps organize our memories, process the information of the day, and solve problems. Such wisdom also suggests that conscious deliberation helps decision making in general. But new research (Dijksterhuis et al., 2009) suggests something else might also be at work — our unconscious.
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