Hay Baling Fun
It is a widespread belief that, contrary to people living in urban areas, farmers have a strong connection with ‘nature’. One seriously starts to doubt that after watching this peculiar video. Thanks Roel Wouters.
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Posts Tagged ‘Calm-technology’
-
-
Seashells are becoming Unnecessary
At the beach, I’m always on the look-out for seashells big enough to hold against my ear to hear the sound of the sea. This child-like behavior still resonates with me. But I got really puzzled when I saw this movie on wired.co.uk.
How it it possible that I can look at an installation, created by Nils Völker using 108 plastic bags, two CPU cooling fans. MDF, relays, countless screws and an Arduino controller and all I can think of is the sea?
-
Technostalgia
In Next Nature, not only old nature is being idealized. Because of the rapidness of new emerging technologies, we have a tendency to dwell on earlier prototypes. To recall memories, or to give that ‘real’ experience. We call this bittersweet longing for past technologies technostalgia. Technostalgia shapes our memories, our past and thus our present.
-
Traces of everday embedded in textile
The ‘Decay’ project explores how traces of time and use can be embedded in textile. By wearing a carbon fibre suit over a white blouse, textile designer Marie Ilse Bourlanges captured the gestures of the body bending, stretching, scratching and rubbing. The transfer imprint on the blouse was then translated into a pattern of lines that ebb and flower across the textile.
Via Slowlab. See also: Harddisk cover that evolves with your data, Agenda Wallpaper.
-
Social Networking with Plants
Using energy is not a social activity. Every electrical device we use has its own carbon “foorpint” which, in excess, can harm other living beings. How and to what extent you’ve just killed a tree at the other side of the world by forgetting to switch off that electric heating, largely remains invisible. What if we could directly experience our electricity use?
With Natural Fuse, you can. Natural Fuse – by London based design studio Haque Design – creates a city-wide network of electronically-assisted plants that act both as energy providers and as circuit breakers. Natural Fuse is a system that harnesses the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants. It creates a community that adds a real social dimension to our energy-use. Natural Fuses are being distributed in London, New York and San Sebastian.
-
Unlimited Urban Woods
What to do when you have a small city with limited space, and you rather turn available space into parking lots instead of parks? You turn to DUS Architects for an unlimited forrest. The Unlimited Urban Woods lets you disappear into an endless forrest that just takes a few square meters.
By placing a real tree into a cubic space of mirrors, the tree gets repeated endlessly, creating the feeling of a forrest. Personally, I would be interested in an endless parking space in the forrest too.
Images by Pieter Kers.
-
Space Monkey
During the 1960s, monkeys were sent into outer space as part of the US space exploration program. But they didn’t all return, until now.
-
Nano Tattoo to Monitor Diabetes
Now here is something for the NANO Supermarket: Massachusetts-based Draper Laboratories have developed a special injectable ink with nano–particles. This ink eventually could replace painful blood glucose tests which diabetics need to do on a regular basis.
Squishy nano spheres, embedded in the ink, consist of three different parts: a glucose detecting molecule, a color changing dye and a glucose mimicking molecule. Those three parts continuously move around in the sphere, approaching the surface the glucose detecting molecule either latches onto the mimicking glucose molecule or a glucose molecule making the color of the sphere change either to yellow or orange. The sampling process repeats itself every few milliseconds and is therefore much faster then most current blood testing systems.
Will the next step be to let our skin tell when we’re irritated or happy?
Via Discovery.
-
Transnatural Expo + Symposium
If you happen to be in the neighborhood you might want to attend the Next Nature lecture I will be throwing at the Transnatural symposium this Saturday 13-03-2010 at the Trouw Building in Amsterdam. Among the other speakers are Elio Caccavale (UK), Tobie Kerridge (UK) and Rachel Armstrong (UK).
The Transnatural exhibition celebrates some of the more successful love affairs between the made & the born. Until March 19th you have the opportunity to see works like Bitfall, Biojewelery and Mudtub, whom you might know from the blogosphere, but are more than worth experiencing in real life. Thus recommended. Hendrik-Jan wrote a more extensive review in the local language.
-
Mud Tub
Mud tub is an experimental tangible interface that allows people to control a computer while playing in the mud. By sloshing, squishing, pulling, punching, etc, in a tub of mud (yes, wet dirt), users control games, simulators, and expressive tools; interacting with a computer in a new, completely organic, way.
The installation was developed by Tom Gerhard in an attempt to further close the gap between our bodies and the digital world, allowing humans to use their highly developed sense of touch, and creative thinking skills in a more natural way. The current applications are merely demonstrators, but we expect to see some digitally enhanced sandboxes in the neighborhood soon.
If you feel like getting dirty: Mudtub is on display at the lustrous Transnatural exhibition in Amsterdam until 19 March 2010.
-
Monitoring your computer’s activity like a frog pond
Multi-touch designer and developer Richard Monson-Haefel considers sound as an important part of our user interfaces. As an application of “Calm Technology” which revolves around giving feedback about the running state of a system in the ‘periphery’ of our consciousness – a concept introduced by ubiquitous computing pioneers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown – he proposes to attach a sound to every process running on your computer: an unique croak, chirp or trill – the sounds of frogs, crickets, and cicadas of a small pond at dusk. Resulting in an ambient environmental murmur people should be able to interpret.
-
The Trillion Node Network
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, a remark made by Thomas J. Watson of IBM in 1943. But what if the number of computing devices connected to each other would reach the number of one trillion? A short animation.
