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.
There’s nothing quite like peeling a piece of fruit, but if you end up with a bottle of Vodka after peeling, you know you have been caught in a biomimicmarketing fantasy. I guess the people of Smirnoff felt this was the most logical packaging for their fruit flavored drinks.
Yale researchers and advertising executives have created the first ad campaign aimed at animals. The targets in question are a group of captive capuchin monkeys with a taste for sugary foods. The experiment introduces two ‘brands’ of jello treats to the monkeys, identical in every way except for color. The goal is see whether billboard advertisements placed around the cage can persuade the monkeys to prefer Color A over Color B.
The posters are the distillation of pretty much everything us humans find appealing in advertisements: sex and power. Previous experiments have showed that the monkeys will ‘pay’ for images of sexy female bottoms and high-ranking males, so the two ads depict the product in association with a female monkey’s exposed genitals and with the troop’s alpha male.
We can only hope that the experiment proves a success. We already know that monkeys understand a currency-based economy, and that crows can be trained to find coins to use in peanut vending machines. Once we’ve inducted other big-brained species into the human economy, advertisers will find unlimited environments where they can induce an artificial need in a natural audience. Maybe we can persuade dolphins to patrol off-shore oil rigs in exchange for cetacean porn, or teach elephants to willingly work on banana plantations, instead of rampaging through them.
Via New Scientist. Image via Monkey Brandz
Sometimes new technology has to bio-mimic old nature to be accepted. In the late 1960s and early 70s, Uniroyal Engineered Products invented the ‘nauga’ a beast that gives its name to naugahyde. The nauga is fictional; it breathes as much as polyvinyl fabric does. Since the new, cheap material could be perceived as off-putting and artificial, the critter was presented as friendly and cuddly. The species is a vegan dream, willingly shedding their hides several times a year. The last of the naugas live free-range on a ranch in Wisconsin. Though the nauga isn’t real, we can still rest assured that chocolate milk comes from chocolate cows.
Via Snopes. Image via Hyde Park Blvd.
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(The creator of this billboard is unknown. If you know, let us know). Thanks Gordon.
In 2009, undergraduates at the University of Cambridge worked with scientists and artists to engineer E. coli into E. chromi, a new type of bacteria that secretes a range of colorful pigments. The genetic ‘BioBricks’ responsible for color can be combined with other custom DNA sequences to achieve various useful effects. For instance, E. chromi could color feces blue in the presence of an intestinal disease, or turn red in response to arsenic in groundwater.
In future scenarios, the altered bacteria give rise to a new profession of chromonauts who search the earth for new organic pigments. The Orange Liberation Front, an imaginary Dutch terrorist organization, might even demand an end to patents on orange-generating genes. The above video, which won the Bio:Fiction prize for documentaries, is a fun look into some plausible (and less so) applications for a new piece of biotech. The technology used for E. chromi bacteria may open new areas for information decoration on a living canvas. Maybe transgenic humans will someday flush blue when they’re feeling down, or cover up an actual yellow belly when they’re being cowardly. I feel less enthusiastic, however, about rainbow-hued poop that marks every stomach bug.
Blue is a beautiful color, but its sound is simply irresistible. It is the song of the unhappy and the depressed. It is a sound that touches people. It was also the sound of a little songbird, the Serinus Canaria Domestica, a sound that so moved me, I was led on a voyage of discovery into the world of birdsong. The Serinus Canaria Domestica is the man-made descendant of the Wild Canary, a finch originally from the Canary Islands, which nowadays exists in many different breeds. This essay deals with the cultivation of the song-bred canary and imagines how its story might lend inspiration to the sound design of electric cars.
While hiking in Trinidad, artist Nina Katchadourian was struck by the similarity of bird calls to car alarms. One inspires us to poetry, the other makes us groan and pull the pillow over our ears at night, but they’re both forms of auditory pollution.
Back in New York, Katchadourian fitted a ‘flock’ of three cars with recorded bird calls to mimic to the six-tone siren that echoes constantly through the city. Far from sounding like a bucolic forest, a ‘natural’ car alarm is just as rattling and irritating as the real thing. Not only is real nature not green, it’s downright annoying.
The appliance company Bosch claims that its new technology keeps food so fresh that meat from the Ice Age (and presumably the Cretaceous as well) can be stored without incident for millennia. From a next nature perspective, we’re less interested in refrigerator advertisements than where we can find a freshly cloned deinonychus ’wing.’ If we doused it in enough spicy barbeque sauce, it might even taste like chicken. Peculiar image of the week.
Via ScaryIdeas.
Always wanted a pair of kitten ears to express your feelings to the world? Well, you probably never thought of that – as you have to be a Japanese genius to come up with such an idea – but now that you’ve seen them you crave for some kitten ears to communicate your feelings to the outer world.
According to the designers of Neurowear.net, the kitten ears convey your feelings by responding to your brainwaves. The ears should go up when you concentrate and down when you relax. Think of it as blushing 2.0. How that brainwave–feelings–ears mapping is exactly algorithmically defined is currently still unclear to us. This could result in some confusing communicative behavior, which wouldn’t matter that much as it would be very kitten like anyhow. Smart.
Thanks Mattheus Swinkels.
In this commercial, the sheep knows that the Peugeot has been made dirty by the splashing mud. Then it proceeds by cleaning it. Slogan: Nature will remember.
We know that this commercial is fiction, but is old nature even aware of our next nature? (By aware I mean that it knows it’s there and that it reacts on it)
I think the answer is yes. Just take a look at the species that have coexisted with us, like mice, cockroaches, crows, pigeons and certain plants. Some people often think of them as pests, as those annoying creatures that just won’t go away no matter how hard we try to get rid of them. But if you take a closer look, it becomes clear that these species are actually very successful at surviving in man-made urban environments: Old nature adapts itself to our next nature!
The zoomorphic designers of Festo, whom you might know from the robot penguins and a robotic elephant trunk, now managed to decipher the flight of birds. Their prototype is modeled on the herring gull and can take off, fly and land while its flight is controlled remotely from the ground in real time.
We are unsure whether these robotic birds will be participating in the enforcement of the no-flight zone in Libya. Anyhow, next time you see a bird flying overhead, look closer.
Thanks Wouter Walmink & Iñaki Merino Albaina.
A smart campaign by Ogilvy Paris for WNF shows that also the ‘non-cute’ animals need our help.
via Fubiz Read more »
Over the coming years, nanotechnology will invade our everyday lives. Nanotechnology, usually defined as the control and manipulation of matter at the nanoscale, will be incorporated in anything from windshields to cancer drugs, and from sun lotion to batteries. But what exactly is this technology that encroaches upon our daily activities?
One strategy of explaining nanotechnology is by referring to scale. For instance, it is said that the dot of this ‘i’ encompasses a million nanoparticles or that a human hair is 80.000 nanometers wide. Surely this sounds impressive, but what exactly does it mean? Would it make any difference to my non-technical mind if a human hair would be 800 nanometers wide? Or 8.000.000 nanometers? How do you imagine a technology that is defined by its size, when that size is too small to imagine?
Biomimic marketing brought back into the fruit shop. Hilarious sketch from BBC’s The One Ronnie. Thanks Jeroen van Meij.
Beautiful Google Maps shots of housing projects in southwest Florida. Probably designed to look and feel more natural than your average straight street neighborhood, they remind me of microbes under a microscope.
Read more »
Nature is a terrific marketing tool and corporations know this. Somehow the natural reference provides us with a familiar feeling of recognition and trust. We call this phenomenon Bio-mimic-marketing: using images of nature to market a product.
Read more on our Biomimic Marketing theme page. Video by Michael Kluver.
They remind us of ourselves
We love their dexterity – thanks partly to that “pseudo thumb”, which functions as a sixth digit.
It’s in the eyes
We love their big eyes because it reminds us of children (‘neoteny’ in scientific terms).
They are shy
The giant panda’s enigmatic nature is in stark contrast to its sheer bulk and striking appearance.
They are cultural symbols
The panda has been made into a symbol since the 1960s. It’s been used by the WWF to convince us about the importance of conservation.
They are rare
Giant Pandas are officially listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s list of endangered species. The official population figure is 1,596.
They are peaceful vegetarians
Although giant pandas are classified as a kind of meat-eater, in the wild they eat almost exclusively bamboo.
See full article/source BBC.com.
Image courtesy WWF.
It’s no secret that Mickey Mouse has evolved in response to consumer pressures. Once a violent river-rat, he became the boy scout of rodents with good looks to match. Steven Jay Gould famously charted Mickey’s pedomorphosis over the years. The mouse reverted to a baby’s bigger skull, bigger eyes, and pudgier snout.
As a child of the 80s and 90s, I’ve noticed the same trend in the toy brands that once littered the floor of my suburban bedroom. Boys toys may be constrained to adult (and therefore masculine) characteristics, but girls’ toys are free to fall under the consumer pressures of the Mickey Effect.
The My Little Pony (MLP) reboot exhibits a classic retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood, a process known as neoteny. The eyes are bigger, the face is rounder and flatter, and the body size and leg length are reduced. Compared to the more conventional equine outline of the original series, the new MLP appears based on an infant, even fetal stage of development.
