Joshua Prince Ramus

Everyone that has work in theater know the face of the building administrator when you tell him that you need to put some screw in his floor or do anything that may be perceibe not quite as a damage, but a modification.

Well there is an Architect that includes that face in the design process of a new theather house in Dallas. This guy, against the idea of architecture based on self expression, take the function of the building and put it in the center of the process, together with the notion of ''architectural manifestations'' should follow the position taked by owner, the user and the designer of the building at the beggining of the design process. That is a quite interesting approach (in times were the magic pen of ''starchitects'' fly full of petrodollars) that leads to a very funtional, responsive and striking architecture.

A virtual view of Haiti's earthquake

I Have found a very powerfull tool to realize the scale of the devastation after the last big earthquake ocurred the afternoon of the Tuesday 12th of January in Haiti. This map provides information in several layers, including one that shows a detailed damage assessment.

(bing maps may be required)

http://www.virtualdisasterviewer.com/vdv/index.php?selectedEventId=7

The view from the ground

How to help through America solidaria foundation

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

GREEN FOOTSTEP, a design tool for sustainable buildings

''Your building, your carbon, and what you can do about it'' ...it's the main idea behind this useful tool for architects. For sure it's not the first carbon footprint calculator but it is the first to include multiple building emissions over the building lifetime, also this tool gives you directions on what to do to decrease the footprint of your projects. This on-line resource was developed by the Rocky Mountain Institut, a group of very prepared people that are very concern about how we use our energetic resources and how we can improve the performance of our built-environments, so concern are they about this topics that not only they make realy good tools to help us to meke good decitions related to the footprint of our projects, but they also explain us the teory and the legislation behind this issues in a realy clear way and with all the reference needed. So, check the site and start to design in a little bit greener way.