Design and the Elastic Mind at the New York Museum of Modern Art

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user's interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Please visit the online exhibition of this mind blowing exhibit of futuristic design at the link here....   more »

              Michel Foucault
In speaking of the disciple of the body especially, when the task of disciple is simultaneously intended to improve its utility for production, here are some riffs on Foucault's: Discipline & Punish. Historical context is primary and Foucault's archaeological method helps uncover the rupture within the Enlightenment whose legacy still haunts us, as Deleuze observes, because they have now morphed into technologies of control.

In the European tradition Foucault traces the disciplining of the body back to medieval Monastic exercises, which were intended to facilitate renunciation of the world. These exercises were transformed when adopted by the socio-political regimes of the 17th & 18th century, (especially military, pedagogical, and industrial) into a method for maintaining control over the actions of the bodies it governed through disciplining processes. These disciplining practices have co-evolved with technology (and are in fact technologies in themselves) to become ever more omnipresent as tools of surveillance and control. Going forward it will be the omnipresence of ubiquitous technologies (bio-technical/computational/networked) that will largely determine the environmental parameters in which our future bodies must structurally couple.

Resistance to the virus of docility, to the infection of the gaze, to the insertion of discipling technologies is often the unintended consequences of the mechanisms of control themselves, as William Gibson says, "the street finds its own use for things". The future is a random other. For example, what we know as the internet today has evolved from technology first designed for survival after a nuclear holocaust.

Activism whose interests lie in discovering alternative, non coercive, paths to human development would be well served to find patterns created by resistances to, and ruptures from, the paradigms of control and technological will organizing the human resources of the planet. Such an activism proceeds by both locating those ruptures in the paradigms of organizational control and cultivating resistance practices to them in ones own life and community. One such practice to resist the discipling machinery of global socio-economic power exchanges is yoga. Although the aim of yoga is to achieve a frictionless flow between individual and cosmos, the many and the one, a yoga such as integral yoga whose concern is not merely a transcendental urge but an immanent concern for the world, is a unique resistance form because its own monastic traditions of psycho/physiological practices, established well before the body was appropriated by the exercises of technicity, allows one to leverage the silence of ones own embodiment as a method of resisting external regimes of control. rc..

   more »

Science aims to help us gain an understanding of reality, yet how can that which is dictated by the laws of logic be used to explain the parts of reality that are non-logical? -- Is it possible that art can be used in a scientific way to create a more accurate expression of reality and a greater understanding of human experience?

A recent article by Jonah Lehrer in SEED Magazine called "The Future of Science....Art?" asks whether art is better suited than science to portray the reality of inner experience: ...   more »

Here's an interesting article re the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project. I disagree with the article's conclusion (it omits the vast online support to be provided to olpc students), but I think it deserves further discussion here on SCIY. What do you think?

---

At the Consumer Electronic Show this week, the One Laptop Per Child foundation was supposed to make two announcements—the number of computers it sold under the Give One, Get One holiday program and a new olpc machine made jointly with Intel. But now Intel has pulled out or been pushed out of the project with olpc, depending on who you believe. It’s a mess and a mess of huge dimensions that encompasses a conversation of profit vs. nonprofit, nationalism vs. colonialism, technology vs. pedagogy, rote vs. experiential learning, Western design vs. Eastern design, good intentions vs. bad intentions. It doesn’t get bigger, or nastier. ...   more »

Optimism exists on a continuum in between confidence and hope. Let me take these in order.

I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of information technology will solve within twenty years the problems that now preoccupy us. -- Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we'll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we'll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.

Almost all the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences (such as global warming) fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem. This development will be motivated not just by concern for the environment but also by the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is already a major area of venture funding.

Consider health. As of just recently, we have the tools to reprogram biology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing through the same exponential growth of information technology, which we see in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has doubled every year, and the price per base pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost a billion dollars. The National Institutes of Health is now starting a project to collect a million genomes at $1,000 apiece. We can turn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults) with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteins and enzymes at critical stages of disease progression. We are gaining the means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processes as information processes. In ten years, these technologies will be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today, and it will be a very different world, in terms of our ability to turn off disease and aging. ...   more »

I can vouch for John Todd's research. I knew him back in the 70's and was impressed then with the quality of his work. His "Eco Machines" are the outcome of 30 years of research and trial and error experimentation. ~ ronjon

Social responsibility, sustainability, and 'natural capitalism' are becoming new models for governments and corporations in the 21st century...

The ECO Machine - a wastewater treatment system that naturally treats sewage and industrial waste to re-use quality. An important consideration as fresh water becomes one of the most important commodities in the new millennium...ECO Machines bring advanced wastewater treatment technology, and unsurpassed aesthetic, economic, and environmental advantages to companies, communities, and resorts both at home and internationally.

ECO Machines accelerate nature's own water purification process. Unlike chemical-based systems, ECO Machines incorporate helpful bacteria, fungi, plants, snails, clams, and fish that thrive by breaking down and digesting organic pollutants, pollutants that normally deprive the water of oxygen. This clean, simple approach efficiently transforms high-strength industrial wastewater and sewage into water clean enough to be recycled for reuse. ...   more »

...it is evident that this site is an urban “zero culture” site and is essentially a devastated ecosystem with little of its original top soil, flora and fauna remaining. The design approach is to re-habilitate this with organic mass to enable ecological succession to take place and to balance the existent inorganicness of this urban site. -- The unique design feature of this scheme is in the well-planted facades and vegetated-terraces which have green areas that approximate the gross useable-areas of the rest of the building. -- The vegetation areas are designed to be continous and to ramp upwards from the ground plane to the uppermost floor in a linked landscaped ramp...

A crucial urban design issue in skyscraper design is poor spatial continuity between street-level activities with those spaces at the upper-floors of the city’s high-rise towers. This is due to the physical compartmentation of floors (inherent in the skyscraper typology)... In creating ‘vertical places’, our design brings ‘street-life’ to the building’s upper-parts through wide landscaped-ramps upwards from street-level. Ramps are lined with street-activities: (stalls, shops, cafes, performance spaces, viewing-decks etc.), up to the first 6 floors.

Ramps create a continuous spatial flow from public to less public, as a “vertical extension of the street” thereby eliminating the problematic stratification of floors inherent in all tall buildings typology. High-level bridge-linkages are added to connect to neighbouring buildings for greater urban-connectivity. ...   more »

Here's another provocative TED video. McDonough shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the sustainable cities he's designing in China. -- This blip is 20 minutes.

---

I highly recommend watching this 3-minute video blip of Stewart Brand's TED talk. (See also SB's 1-hr. "City Planet" talk at Google.)   ~ ronjon

---

The new IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in Iceland

I dedicate this light tower to John Lennon
my love for you is forever

Yoko Ono
Videy Island, Reykjavik, Iceland
October 9th 2007   more »

His name means the Green One or Verdant One, he is the voice of inspiration to the aspirant and committed artist. He can come as a white light or the gleam on a blade of grass, but more often as an inner mood. The sign of his presence is the ability to work or experience with tireless enthusiasm beyond one's normal capacities ...

And I have felt....a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

~ William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey   more »

Every year, tens of thousands of participants gather to create Black Rock City in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, dedicated to self-expression, self-reliance, and art as the center of community. They leave one week later, having left no trace. Read Burning Man's mission statement, 10 Principles, and learn more about this incredible experience. ...   more »

Thanks to RY Deshpande for referring this article.

---

Our built environment should integrate clean tech and renewable energy generation of all forms and this is an example of that concept.  Michael Jantzen proposed a design for California State University at Fullerton that would turn the everyday gathering pavilion into a discussion on sustainability.  The pavilion could serve as the gathering place for up to 300 people.  From the images, notice the wind turbine and the solar panels on the roof.  Towering into the air at 150 feet tall, any energy harvested from the turbine and solar panels could be used by the university.  Inside, there's a cylindrical digital projection display screen, roof-mounted fogging nozzles to cool the interior, and benches that can be stored inside the floor when not in use. ...
   more »

Not so long ago, no conversation about innovation would be complete without the story of 3M inventor Art Fry’s eureka moment that led to the Post-it Note. Today, that tale, which verges on cliche, has been almost universally replaced by the story of the iPod, Apple’s omnipresent icon of design.

It should come as little surprise, then, that Apple tops the BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for the third year in a row. That sort of staying power speaks volumes about the sort of innovation that matters today. Unlike the Post-it Note, which proves the value of lone inventors, the iPod epitomizes today’s innovation sensibilities. These include the ascendance of design, the focus on the user’s experience, and the power of ecosystems: The iPod is a hit because it works so seamlessly with the iTunes software. The company’s much-anticipated iPhone, which launches in June, will likely keep Apple high on our list next year too. ...   more »

...at the dawn of a new era of digital lives in which computers are only part of an expanding consumer-electronics industry, the odds are on Mr Jobs and Apple as the winner. In the past six years Apple, with its iPod player and iTunes service, has come to lead the (legal) digital-music industry roughly as Microsoft dominates the PC industry with Windows. On June 29th Apple will enter an even bigger market when it launches a new mobile phone, called the iPhone.

Ostensibly, Mr Jobs's ambitions for the iPhone are modest. He expects 10m to be sold by the end of next year, about 1% of the world market for handsets. Apple has sold ten times as many iPods. But these numbers belie the significance of the iPhone—and Mr Jobs's ambitions for it. Rather, it represents the latest step in the transformation of Apple, from a computer-maker to a consumer-electronics company, which Mr Jobs made official this year with the symbolic dropping of the word “Computer” from the firm's name. His success in this transformation so far, and the expectation of a new phase thanks to the iPhone, explain why Apple, one decade after nearly collapsing, is now worth more than $100 billion and is to be included in America's blue-chip elite, the Standard & Poor's 100 index. ...   more »

Designed by Roberto Chiotti of Larkin Architects, this $10.5-million facility – which received prestigious Gold certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system – proves once and for all that green building need not be expensive, or unpleasant to look at or inhabit. If anything, it makes a case for sustainable architecture that's so compelling, it's sad to think it remains the exception.

Surrounded on every side by some of the most dreary and depressing architecture, St. Gabriel's (670 Sheppard Ave. E.) stands as a beacon. Using poured-in-place concrete, recycled pews, specially treated glass and lots of (coloured) natural light, Chiotti has pulled off something miraculous. Essentially, he has reinvented that most ancient of architectural forms, the church. ...   more »