Though the example product seems a little far-fetched; growth assembly could be quite revolutionary. Worldwide shipping of manufactured things is very inefficient. Why not ship devices and utensils in a single envelope? As seeds.
“Our idea of industry will grow to include nature. Genetically altered organisms will be an everyday thing. Introducing diversity and softness to a realm once dominated by heavy manufacturing. Shops will evolve into factory farms. Licenced products are grown where sold. We will no longer ship products around the world. Only seeds will be shipped as they contain all the manufacturing instructions encoded in their dna.”
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Today’s technology advances so rapidly that people are often unable to update their media schemas in time and as a result are left cluelessly in awe of it all. Mike Thompson’s Wifi dowsing rod aims to work against this: By basing the design for a wireless internet detector on ancient technology, the user should immediately feel at home with the device.
Although perhaps impractical and anecdotal, the Wifi dowsing rod is an intriguing attempt of using ‘magic’ as a construct to cope with the technological complexity accumulating around us. A great gift for your grand-grand-parents.
Related: Magical interaction, Your grand-grand-grand-parents new media, Dandella shows you the way, Voodoo communication device.
Getting information as fast as possible and on the spot is the trend. So what could be more direct than having information fired directly into the eye?
Today — together with his students — Babak A. Parviz, bionanotechnology expert at University of Washington, is already producing devices that have a lens with one wirelessly Radio Frequency powered LED. To turn such a lens into a functional browser, control circuits, communication circuits and miniature antennas will have to be integrated. These lenses will eventually include hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye: words, charts, imagery enabling the wearers to navigate their surroundings whithout distraction or disorientation. The optoelectronics in the lens may be controlled by a seperate device that relays information to the lens’s control circuit. Read the rest of this entry »
Japanese design agency To-Genkyo proposes a dynamic freshness label for meat products. The hourglass-shaped label contains special ink that changes color based on the amount of ammonia emitted by the meat (the older the meat, the more ammonia it releases).
Hence you can easily read from the handy label if the meat is still fresh!! But wait.. could you not simple derive from the meat ITSELF if it is fresh? Well, some can perhaps, but nowadays most people can not ‘read meat’, so we need an authoritative label to tell us what we can and can’t consume.
Elegant detail: When the meat is no longer suitable for sale, the ink blocks the barcode at the bottom so that it cannot be scanned at the cash register.
Via Pinktentacle. Related: Forefather Ox cloned to revive delicious steak, Image consumption, Where it came from, Orthorexia Nervosa, The meat of tomorrow.
What if a scratch on your car door could heal itself, just like the human skin does?
Engineers are working on a way to transfer the self-healing ability of the skin to surfaces and materials. The idea behind this, is to evenly distribute fluid-filled capsules into an electroplated layer on top of the material that could be subject to corrosion and rust. If the surface is damaged, the pellets burst and a coating fluid runs out to ‘repair’ the scratch. Read the rest of this entry »
Meet A.T.R.E.E.M. (acronym for Automated Tree-Rental for Emission Encaging Machine), a device that compares daily activities, energy and products to the growth of a tree.
“From an ecological perspective, CO2 is a byproduct of the living, either directly or indirectly. From the economic perspective, CO2 may become the world’s largest commodity market. What do we consider the price of our own byproducts?
This project aims to criticise the carbon trading system as well as raise awareness of how good we are at destroying the planet.”
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For a while now printer ink is probably the most expensive liquid per litre on earth. Still we need our images so badly that we accept this fact. The Human Printer manages to make it even more expensive (although for now it’s free). Watch how it works and view the different printer models.
Most people know about light emitting organisms such as jellyfishes, fireflies and mushrooms. Some time ago, genetic engineers transferred genes responsible for the luciferin and luciferase proteins into a tobacco plant. These firefly proteins were then manufactured by the tobacco plant, causing it to glow and emit light.
What if this technology could be extended further to say, a maple tree or a juniper bush? Designer Audrey Richard-Laurent speculates on combining trees and streetlights into bioluminescent trees. In urban areas, one usually sees a row of trees parallel to streetlights. Why not hybridize them?
An elegant, yet far fetched idea? Don’t be to sure. Already in 2007 Edward A Quinto of the International Society for Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence produced a glowing christmas tree.
Bioluminescence works to replicate processes for creating light found in chemical reactions in the natural world–such as with certain jellyfish or bacteria–for human purposes. Chemiluminescence refers to the emission of light with limited emission of heat as a result of chemical reaction. Many researchers feel that both of these processes have the potential to produce sustainable, non-petroleum-based light sources.
Other potential applications might be glow in the dark designer pets, agricultural crops and domestic plants that luminesce when they need watering, new methods for detecting bacterial contamination of meats and other foods and glowing grass on golf yards that allow you to play golf after dark.
See also: Green glowing monkeys, the blogging houseplant.
Designer Carlijn Compen upgraded her watertap with some LED’s that shift color along with the heat of the water. A simple yet effective example of information decoration that will seamlessly fit in the ambient bathroom. I don’t know whether the electricity for the LED’s is generated by water power.
Related: Ambient bathtub, Wallpaper blooms when the heat is on, Energy consumption shown on power plant, Datafountain, Power aware cord, Excitement clothing, Information decoration for dummies.
I tend to think of the Philips Wake Up Light as a product of missed opportunity: Good concept, implementation too cheap and illustrative. Especially the crappy bird-sounds are even more annoying than those of any classical alarm clock and certainly do not provide for a more ‘natural’ wake-up experience.
Perhaps I am just not in the target group of the product – I hate plastic flowers you know. Still, I was curious to see how roosters respond to the Wake Up Light.
Related: This way for survival, Steam Horse, Who wants to drive a fish?, Romantic sunsets. Thanks Sylvain.
