My notes from the Future Food Seminar which took place at Baltan Laboratories on Monday evening and gathered people with radically different backgrounds and insights to reflect on the re-invention of global strategies for the design of our future food system
Category Archive: design
Pater is a graphic designer who gave himself the mission to create visual narratives about complex political issues. He is not only interested in flying machines of death but also in disaster floods caused by global warming, Dutch sweets that evoke everyday racism, fishermen vs oil tankers, citizen journalism in countries with censorship, digital surveillance, etc
Sonic booms and nuclear power are explored as replacements to petroleum offering up new dreams of energy efficiency and innovation through technology
advertising
The OpenSurgery initiative investigates whether building DIY surgical tools, outside the scope of healthcare regulations, could plausibly provide an accessible alternative to the costly professional healthcare services worldwide.
By presenting a semi-functional DIY surgery robot, theoretically capable of assisting in domestic keyhole surgery, the project provokes alternative thinking about medical innovation and aims to challenge the socioeconomic frameworks healthcare currently operates within
Wealth Beyond Big Brother looks at what happens to trans-border exchanges when they take place inside highly unregulated states. More precisely within the confines of the disputed territories depicted in George Orwell’s book 1984
Each object is made from the amount of toxic waste created in the production of three items of technology – a smartphone, a featherweight laptop and the cell of a smart car battery. Besides, the vases are sized in relation to the amount of waste created in the production of each item
social
An invitation to artists, researchers, activists and critical engineers to submit ideas, thoughts, and designs for the future of 3D printing. The submissions should reflect on the current state of additive manufacturing, find the potential encoded into the most challenging 3D printed objects and push 3D printing to its most speculative and radical limits. Once collected, these submissions will form The 3D Additivist Cokbook
Printing Things is an inspirational and understandable exploration of the creative potential of 3D printing. The book not only introduces outstanding projects, key experts, and the newest technologies, but it also delves into the complex topics that these paradigm-shifting technologies bring up, such as how to handle copyrights and seamless manufacturing
Objection!!! pushes the court strategies and dramatizations to their most cinematographic limits. Using a series of models, objects, images and a fictionalized case in which a tv National Lottery draw is fixed, Gaynor exposes how the language of film-making manipulates the way a case is presented to the court and how it is understood by it. According to the whim of the team that scripts, shoots then edit the trial, the unfolding of a court case could be made to look comical, suspenseful, romantic, tragic or even satirical
PSX has designed a total of six gadgets that meet the specific sexual needs of plants. Some flowers were outfitted with a vanity lace to prevent the spread of STDs, others were given an algae-containing dildo or a vibrator
Hendriks and Thomson are planning to build a fatberg the size of an oil rig. Not as a speculative design project, but as a process that will generate insights and tools that facilitate a paradigm shift through the creation of the FATBERG itself – “inspirational data” to stimulate the imagination
Every year in the city of Ghent, thousands of the Invasive Canada Goose need to be killed by the city government. At huge public expenses. What if we convinced citizens to eat the birds instead? And convince the vegetarian community to get involved in the process?
The most banal-looking wooden frame takes a life of its own as soon as you come near it. It quickly positions itself in front of you, spots your eyes and starts expressing ’emotions’ based on your own. Eye Catcher uses the arm of an industrial robot, high power magnets, a hidden pinhole camera, ferrofluid and emotion recognition algorithms to explore novel interactive interfaces based on the mimicry and exchange of expressions
The Engine Block group envisions a not so distant-future when instead of buying the latest model of a vehicle or machine, people will be able to take (post-)post-industrialisation into their own hands and use a unique modular engine that they can re-purpose and customize to their specific needs
Can we continue to exist within an infrastructure that seeks to not only resist, but nullify natural forces? How might we approach increasingly fragile sites in a way that challenges the inherited attitude of conquering nature as though it were an opponent? Can the temporary spaces that occur naturally in the environment provide us with a new way in which design can operate?
Have you ever tried to imagine how a fish soup tastes whose recipe is based on publicly available local fishing data? Or what a pizza would be like if it was based on Helsinki’s population mix? Data Cuisine explores food as a means of data expression – or, if you like – edible diagrams
The Social Mining Union (SUM), aims to reposition the role of the ‘labour union’ (and function of positive activism) within a globalized landscape of post-consumer society, examining the industrial mining industry and peripheral territories it is associated with
In this book, synthetic biologists, artists, designers, and social scientists investigate synthetic biology and design. After chapters that introduce the science and set the terms of the discussion, the book follows six boundary-crossing collaborations between artists and designers and synthetic biologists from around the world, helping us understand what it might mean to ‘design nature.’
The exhibition ‘Resolute – Design Changes’ in Breda shows the work of graphic designers who aren’t afraid to come to grip with burning social and political issues.
Their work goes beyond protest. The designers make us confront problems we’d rather not think about, they turn complex issues into clear and limpid posters, and some of them even craft tools that can be used for immediate action
Terrorist groups are no different from other organizations in their use of branding to promote their ideas and to distinguish themselves from groups that share similar aims. The branding they employ may contain complex systems of meaning and emotion; it conveys the group’s beliefs and capabilities. Branding Terror is the first comprehensive survey of the visual identity of the world’s major terrorist organizations, from al-Qaeda and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to the Tamil Tigers
Published twice per year, and weighing in at more than 200 pages, each issue of HOLO provides intimate views into fascinating studios, workshops, and institutions around the world, as seen through the eyes of stellar photographers and talented writers. The pace, depth, and sensibility of print allows us to invest heavily in each story, and draw on months of travel, research, and conversation to craft nuanced portraits that you won’t find anywhere else
In this episodes we’re going to talk about James’ PHD thesis Why Robots? which uses the robot as a vehicle to study how technology be domesticated. But the designer will also discusss preferable futures and electronic devices that know more about your partner’s emotional state than you do
The Phillips Hydraulic Computer was an analog computer created in 1949 by Professor Bill Phillips to model the economic processes of the United Kingdom using water and transparent plastic tanks.’ Inspired by this hubris of correlating human behavior to mechanical equations’, Design Interactions student Neil Thomson is currently attempting to create a Phillips machine based on modern economic models
Superflux is looking at the ways emerging technologies interface with the environment and everyday life and the result of their research is a rather extraordinary portfolio which explores deviant economies for India’s elastic cities, climate change, political engagement, desertification, human enhancement, etc
Designer Austin Houldsworth imagined a monetary system within the cultural context of Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two. The payment system would challenge the established monetary function of ‘a store of value’, creating a new method of exchange that encourages people to actively destroy their money during a transaction
This week i’ve invited designer and artist Matthew Plummer-Fernandez to talk to us about 3D-printed objects & the freedom but also the patent trolls and censorship that accompany them
These fables show potential of putative simple organisms in the past, present and future. What if invasive species become a weapon? What if the next danger is an engineered physical insect, not a digital one?
Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction
My guests in the studio will be Carmen Salas and Estela Oliva, the founders of Alpha-ville, a London-based organisation with a mission to connect people working in the fields of art, technology, design and digital culture. Alpha-ville has been busy since 2009 organising events, commissioning new works and curating programmes for arts and cultural organisations, festivals, promoters, events and agencies
My guest in this show will be Alex Fleetwood who founded London-based Hide&Seek in 2007. Hide&Seek is a game design studio which re-imagines public space as a place to play. They create new games and experiences, curate and support the work of artists and designers, and right now they are working on games inspired by a month-long Christmas party that King William III held at Kensington Palace in 1699
The publication examines the increasingly important role of digital fabrication in contemporary art, design, and architecture practice from 2005 to the present. New levels of expression will demonstrate the reciprocal relationship between art and innovation as seen through the lens of emerging twenty first century aesthetics
Michiko and Michael’s work is never without surprise. Whether they entrust opera singers to produce food in a future world where algae have become the world’s dominant food source or explore the possibility of a city that would be isolated from the wider environment and where food, energy, and even medicine, are derived from human origin and man-made biological systems.
Inspired by the environmental work of Diller & Scofidio, the performative and multi-sensory work of Bompas and Parr, and the nostalgia of 1960s event architecture, the project utilises sugar as a base element and ‘centrifugal random fibre extrusion’ fabrication (candyfloss) to build a candy floss cloud on an architectural scale
Suzanne Lee is the Founder of BIOCOUTURE, the first ‘living materials’ design consultancy. The last time i met Suzanne, she was cultivating bacteria into green tea and harvesting layers of cellulose which, once dried looked like leather that she then used to make garments.
Suzanne’s work has now taken an even more ambitious dimension as she is building an open innovation resource to enable collaboration within the global biological materials community
This brilliant little exhibition considers the connections between craft practice and sound art in the ‘digital age’. Exploring the physicality of sound, the works are characterised by both their sonic properties and materiality
Ototo is an experimental printed circuit board (PCB), which, combining sensors, inputs and touchpads, allows you to easily create your own electronic musical instrument
The designers will be talking about the aesthetics of scientific experiments but also about the human capabilities in sensing future events. They’ve explored this slightly debatable topic with a series of experiments inspired by the experimental evidence for the existence of physiological precognition, depicted the Sensing the Future paper written by Daryl J. Bem a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University.
Digital media are disappointing for books. All books look the same on an iPad, for example. On a monitor, a book isn’t thick or thin, big or small. Features such as a Japanese binding, embossing, letterpress printing, or gilt edging are only possible in print. Consequently, it isn’t surprising that young, contemporary designers, publishers, typographers, illustrators, and editors are enthusiastically ringing in a new era for printed books.
Fully Booked: Ink on Paper is a collection of books and other printed products that celebrate the distinctiveness of design, materials, techniques, workmanship, and production methods–and push their limits
In the face of impending climate crises, environmentalists are standing with the Bio-Conservatives or with the Techno-Progressives.
However, a number of emerging factors suggest possible alternatives for the relationship between environmentalism and science. Among these are the DIYBIO or Biopunk movements and the campaign for open access to science, as well as headless and cell-based networks of activists such as Anonymous
Zhenhan Hao explored China’s copy culture in an attempt to go beyond the ‘illegal’, ‘vile’ and ‘evil’ epithets that are usually associated with the practice. In China, the artist/designer proposed a new production model for craftspeople in Dafen village and Jingdezhen, ‘the porcelain capital of China’, to imitate and create at the same time. The result is a series of improvised products that sought to inspire the imitators to explore their imagination and creativity