Mobile Phone Avant La Lettre
Our peculiar image of the week is exemplary of our human longing for technology that intimately integrates with our body & senses. We are all cyborgs.
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 ‘Officegarden’
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Evolution Goes On
Surely, some day smartphones want to find out where they come from too, no? Nextnatural comic on the origins of a next species by Dave Coverly.
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The Action Plant Runs Away from Your Touch
Plants have it tough. They’re tasty, silent, and stuck to the spot. With Jurema Action Plant, artist Ivan Henriques has given plants the mobility they deserve . Henriques’ pieces links up Mimosa pudica – the touch-me-not plant – with hacked wheelchair. When the plant’s touch-sensitive leaves curl away from a person’s prying fingers, integrated sensors trigger the wheelchair robot to scoot away to safety.
While plants do not have nervous systems like animals or wires like machines, they do use electrical signaling within their cells. Henriques takes advantage of this fact, using a series of electrodes placed around the plant to measure changes in its electromagnetic field. These electrodes communicate to the robot which direction it should flee. Add a pair of water tanks, and the shy Mimosa plant is fully self-sufficient. Jurema Action Plant is a hybrid entity, a way to empower plants through machinery to give them the trappings of conscious behavior. Just like the Lorax, Jurema Action Plant speaks for the trees.
Action Plant will be exhibited at the 2012 Transnatural Festival in Amsterdam.
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Rainbow Roses
We spotted these hypernatural rainbow roses at the train station in Utrecht. Indeed they look a bit over date, I guess drinking rainbow ink doesn’t make them last any longer.
Join us in spotting Next Nature phenomena using our iphone spotter. The best spots win a Next Nature book.
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Salad Dress
Hey there green fanatics! Push your organic-sustainable-veggie-lifestyle in the overdrive with the Salad Dress, created by Sara Hillenberger. No pollution, no child labor and no animals where hurt making of this dress. Its a 100% utopian green.
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How People spend their Day
No, you aren’t looking at a graph of the Earths geological layers. The layers in this visualization represent an average of how thousands of Americans spent their day.
The data was collected by the American Time Use Survey, which NY Times translated into this interactive map that allows you to see the differences between various groups like employed, unemployed, men, women, Black, White and Hispanic.
Would be fascinating to compare the graph with a day in the life of a caveman – the hunting & gathering type. Surely there would be less time watching TV & movies back then, but how about household activities? Traveling and Socializing? We wonder how the border between work and leisure worked for them and whether they were active during the same ‘office hours‘.
Related: Time pilots us, Office Rebellion, Supermarket – our next savanna.
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Leaf Thermometer
Designer Hideyuki Kumagai must have been inspired by the seasonal colors of nature when he designed this thermometer.
Stick the leaves to your window, or make a bush at your office garden, and they will tell you how hot it is by changing color. If it is nice and warm (20-25 degrees) the leaves stay fresh green. When it becomes cooler they slowly turn brown. And if they turn yellow, then you know it is time to cool down.
Via JapanTrendShop.
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IKEA Lamp Catches Elephantiasis Virus
Have you heard of Elephantiasis? It is a disease caused by microscopic parasitic worms that cause a thickening of the skin and underlying tissues. The disease typically occurs in tropical regions, however, as it seems it recently transferred to consumer products.
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Featured Page #02: Google Nature
During the coming weeks, we will present a selection of our favourite pages from the Next Nature book. This week the second one in this series: Google Nature.
Imagine you are an intelligent alien from outer space that has just landed on Earth. Before you can mingle with the earthlings you’d need to learn their language. It seemed like a smart idea to start at Google image search. Just type in a word and you’ll immediately get a collage of images that show you what it means (by the way: this is also a helpful tip for the more visually oriented humans among us). Let’s start for example with the word dandelion. That teaches you a lot about the different phases of this flower and how it propagates!
So far so good, but things are rapidly getting more bizarre. For instance when you try the Beetle, or the Puma: both somewhat confusing. The Lion seems to be fine, that ‘s the meat-eating animal that jumps on other animals. Jaguar seems to be more schizophrenic again. Better avoid the Apple. The Blackberry, however, is peculiar. It’s not certain where they grow.
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Featured here are pages 88-89 from the book Next Nature: Nature Changes Along with Us. More information about the book can be found here.
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Making Deserts Flourish
Using only plastic sheets and an irrigation-nutrient system, a Japanese researcher has found a way to change agriculture as we know it. Professor Yuichi Mori argues in his talk at TEDx Tokyo that a film made of hydrogel with nano-sized holes in it is the most important ingredient for growing crops.
The roots of plants will attach themselves to the transparent membrane plastic and the technique uses much less fertilizer and one tenth of the water to produce the same amount of crops as in conventional agriculture.
According to Mori any surface in the world will work, from contaminated ground from the Tsunami in Japan in 2011 to the desert. This last statement is being tested at the moment, as desert greenhouses in the Middle East are supplied with the technique.
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The Evolutionary History of Office Chairs
On the shortlist for the year’s strangest book title, Jonathan Olivares’ A Taxonomy of Office Chairs charts the “evolution” of chairs from the 1840s to the present day. The author explicitly uses the language of biological classification, opening with a quote from Baudrillard that describes consumer objects as reproducing species. Olivares notes that “I find it ironic and unnerving that our society cherishes, studies and documents the natural world, but keeps little track of the products that make up our predominant reality.”
In his analysis, Olivares discovered that the individual components of chairs – bases, backs, and armrests – evolved independently. The gradual changes in the design of a chair don’t mirror, for instance, the logical sequence of horse evolution, but more like something along the lines of bacterial conjugation, when whole genetic sequences can be swapped in and out. It’s arguable whether the conceit is more than a useful metaphor, but it may be that chairs can join razors, phones and corporate logos as objects that appear to evolve like organisms.
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Corpus 2.1
Could you imagine yourself having QR-code freckles, or a chlorophyl skin? Dutch artist Marcia Nolte visualises these kind of speculative scenarios in a very non-spectacular yet beautiful way. This Corpus 2.1 series is a follow-up to her earlier Corpus 2.0 series, of which we also featured a stunning image in our book.
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Growing Plants in the Dark
While sunlight contains all colors, the dominant type of chlorophyll in plants only needs purple light to function. This simple fact has big implications for the future of farming. Crops planted in soil, of course, depend on the sun, while commercial greenhouses use white light to grow their crops. All that extra red, green and yellow energy is wasted on the plants.
PlantLab has taken advantage of chlorophyll’s little quirk. By using red and blue LEDs to create purple light, they have dramatically cut the energy needed to grow plants indoors. The special lights boost the efficiency of photosynthesis from 9% to between 12 and 15%. Growing plants in a closed system conserves heat, water, and nutrients, and cuts the need for pesticides. Since the crops no longer need access to sunlight, they can be grown in dense stacks. The future of vertical farming looks a lot like a nightclub for plants.
Watch the introductory video here.
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Essay: Essay: Time Between Emergence and Design
Previously, experiences of time emerged from nature as given – offering seasons, the rhythm of humans, plants and animals. Nowadays, people integrate nature-time, body-time, inner-time, clock-time, and global 24/7 systems-time. Human beings, in past, current and next natures, have to deal with emergence and design of time in order to survive.
By CAROLINE NEVEJAN
To think about how future new worlds are visualized, assumes that these images reveal how life in decades to come will be shaped. These visualizations offer insight into today’s imagination of next natures and next cultures to come. However, in these visualizations ‘time’ as a process of emergence and design, is often forgotten. This essay argues that time design is distinct in any next nature that will emerge.
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Greetings from the Ohio Turnpike
Apparently freeways have obtained a level of nostalgia that they are now suitable objects to be depicted on postcards (speaking of nostalgic objects). Perhaps one day in the future, freeways will be remembered as the fossils of a society dominated by auto-mobility. Peculiar image of the week.
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Dumpster Fish the Future of Farming
Cities have seen guerilla gardens, rooftop honey production, and fire escape chicken coops. Now, urban farmers may be adding aquaculture to the mix. Headed by ex-banker Christopher Toole, the Society for Aquaponic Values and Education in the Bronx, New York, raises tilapia in tanks and trashcans. Closed recirculating systems use the waste from the fish to fertilize herbs like mint and basil. Toole and his girlfriend and partner, Anya Pozdeeva, envision a future where neighborhood fish like “Bronx Best Blue Tilapia” become a thriving local industry.
Efforts from Toole and other New York tilapia pioneers like NYU professor Martin P. Schreibman may represent the future of fish. As cities grow, and wild fish stocks dwindle to near-depletion by 2050, the urban production of hardy, freshwater species like the tilapia could be a sustainable way for city-dwellers to have their fish and eat it too. Urban aquaculture faces some steep hurdles before becoming a profitable venture. Similar small-scale city fish farms have flopped over costs and lack of demand. However, there is one bright spot: In China, which has practiced fish farming since 2,000 BC, indoor recirculating aquaculture is doing a booming business.
Photo via Blue Ridge Aquaculture.
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Rule #7: Respect Social Standards
Part 7 of the 11 part series Golden Rules of Anthropomorphism and Design.
Anthropomorphic products enter the human social space. Humans have the most complex social behavior of any organism on Earth. Anyone or anything trying to join in should be careful to do it right. Although an anthropomorphic product may function perfectly, if it crosses social boundaries it will still tick people off. This can cause the product to become a social reject, which won’t do sales much good. Luckily, it’s not hard to figure out why things go wrong. Imagine a scenario where a person and a product interact, then replace the product with a second person. If the actions of the second person and the product don’t match up, then there’s something off about the product’s design.
Image via Anvari.
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A Fake Sun for Your 25/7 Life
The earth operates on a 24 hour cycle, and so do humans. For most of history, we didn’t have much choice in the matter. However, in the absence of visual cues light sunlight, some research indicates that humans naturally stick to a 25 hour schedule. So why rely on the earth’s rotation to order our lives?
I-Weather is a website and app that cycles through blue and orange light for a period of 25 hours, 40 minutes and 7 seconds. The blue ‘day’ suppresses the hormone melatonin and promotes wakefulness. The orange ‘night’ has no impact on melatonin or other hormones, allowing users to work or to drift off as they please. I-Weather acts like an online sun,”creating the world’s first artificial climate to satisfy the metabolic and physiological requirements of a human being in an environment partially or completely removed from earthly influences.” It’s good for travelers, insomniacs, and anyone with a grudge against sunlight.
For a more practical way to regulate your circadian rhythms, check out F.lux.
