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.
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 -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.
Recently i've came to know the sculptor Martin Puryear (1941), he catch my atention with his wooden sculptures who resembles in a very subtle way some ''cultural bags'', objects that carry representative shapes and shades of an past moment in history, like a Wooden wheel or a ladder.
Another thing that realy grab me was the austerity of his work. Almost all his pieces are built in only one material, this can be stone or metal but above all wood. This artist fill spaces with objects that are wonderfully crafted in wood in wich ones you can recognize the most traditional techniques of woodworking. The relation with cabinet-making it's obvious in every joint. The cultural explotarion of his work goes through the objects into techniques, and put the ancient knowledge of woodworking into the lenguage of modern Art.
What i like of Puryear? the way he relates deeply with the material, the cultural and simbolic awareness of the comun objects. An also the way that he translate his wooden shapes into other materials.
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
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. MORE
This week i have been in two very unusual and interesting places, two museum of contemporary products, Mercedes Museum and Vitra Museum.
The big diference between those museum and the regular ones (like history, Natural history, or an Antropology Museum) is that in this ones you can see a sample of a particular product an also you can see the path that leeds him to that point and the later development. In a historical museum in were the object exposed are a unique sample that comes to describe an specific cultural moment, you can only infer the amount of work and the creativity weigth of that single piece of craftmanship and, in the same way, you also have to infer the value of that object had for the people that in first place possessed it. Like the value of an spear for a hunter. But what happend when you step in front of a complete chain of development in the same object? you can see the value of craftmanship because you see the process behind every detail of that product, and how that solution connects with the cultural situation.
So, what it's the relevance of this museum? it's not the recolection of precious objects but the visualization of the cultural situation and value system through crafts.
What it is important about this is the understanding that the products didn't born in their optimal stage -if that even exist- but they evolve to fit the cultural expectations. Because of that we can't expect the perfect product, but more important than that is that we can project the future step in the evolution of a single product based in the understanding of this cultural expectations upon that product.
Then we can say that the main feature of this kind of excibition is the craft, but the craft understood as the apply understandind of cultural expectations into the phisical tansformation of the matter. The craft as the act of visualize and therefore create… …from my point of view, Design.
For more information on the product evolution watch this video
