Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear, which Van Strien exhibited at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show during Dutch Design Week last year, consists of five coats made out of cut sheets of folded tarpaulin.
“It’s a kind of trend forecast for a dystopian future that, when everything is not so great with the economic stuff that’s going on right now, we might be heading towards,” says Van Strien. “It will be cold; people will be unhappy; we’ll be living in buildings that are just grey blocks. These are coats that we could produce for people that don’t have a lot of money, when we don’t have a lot of materials, when a coat needs to last for a lifetime.”
Van Strien says he chose tarpaulin because it is cheap, resilient and simple to work with.
“[The coats] are all cut from a single piece of black tarpaulin,” he says. “You then have to weld the parts together with heat. In the front I’ve made closures with magnets and that’s pretty much it. This material is super easy to work with, you don’t need to finish it or anything and it will last forever.”
The coats were designed to provoke a reaction and make people think about where the world could be heading, Van Strien says.
“A lot of people feel a bit creeped out [by the coats] and that is the goal, that we think about how we’re handling our social malaise,” he explains. “I see myself as a fashion designer, so I’ve looked at this from a purely aesthetic point of view. But the thought behind it is something that I feel very strongly about. I never make a garment just because it’s pretty, it always has to tell a story.”
Despite being designed for a future that does not exist yet, Van Strien says he has been approached by a number of people interested in putting the coats into production.
“I was not planning on putting these coats into production when I first made them, it was just a statement,” he says. “But a couple of parties have come up and they asked me if I wanted to take them into production so now I’m considering it.”
Martijn Van Strien. Copyright: Dezeen
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
Baas’ career was launched by the success of his Smoke chair, which he developed for his graduation show at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002.
“That was quite an instant success,” he says of the chair, which he created by singeing a second-hand piece of furniture with a blow torch and is now produced by Dutch design brand Moooi.
Smoke exhibition by Maarten Baas at Moss, New York
Baas continues: “In 2004, with Murray Moss [founder of design art company Moss] in New York, I made a solo show in which I did some design icons of the 20th century according to the Smoke principle – burning the furniture.”
Clay furniture by Maarten Baas
Baas describes his range of Clay furniture, which is created by hand-moulding a synthetic clay around a metal frame, as a “next step”, before moving on to discuss his Real Time series of of video clocks.
Baas’ video clocks include Analog Digital (above), in which a performer replicates a digital clock by painting over and wiping clean panels on a glass screen. His Sweeper Clock (below) features two men with brooms pushing lines of debris to form moving clock hands.
He also created a grandfather clock, in which an old man seems to draw the hands of the clock from inside.
“Actually, all the concepts are still developing and still running,” he says. “Currently we’re working with Carpenters Workshop Gallery to make a series of two clocks: a grandfather clock and a grandmother clock.”
Grandfather and Grandmother Clocks by Maarten Baas, presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Design Miami 2013
“As we speak, we are filming the grandmother clock. We are making a twelve-hour movie in which she is drawing the hands of the clock. In twelve hours time we should be finished.”
Maarten Baas’ Grandmother Clock being filmed at his studio
Although Baas has based his studio in the countryside outside of Eindhoven since 2009, he says that the city where he studied is still close to his heart.
“Eindhoven is a very industrial city, which makes it a very practical city,” he explains. “There are a lot of production companies that support people that want to make something and I like the rock and roll style of Eindhoven. It’s kind of rough and people have a lot of energy.”
Maarten Baas. Copyright: Dezeen
“I didn’t want to be part of the city that much anymore, so I went out of the city to the countryside. But still, if I come to Eindhoven I feel that energy of everything that is going on there and I really like that.”
Our MINI Paceman in Eindhoven
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
Cologne 2014: the colour temperature of this series of LED lamps by Rotterdam designer Arnout Meijer can be adjusted to create different moods throughout the day (+ movie).
Meijer presented the project as part of the [D3] Design Talents exhibition at imm cologne trade fair last week.
He designed the Thanks for the Sun series in response to the need for light that fulfils different roles – providing bright white light for working and aiding concentration, and a warmer, more soothing hue to help people relax before bed.
“When you think about a lamp design, you design everything but the light: you design the shade, construction, base, etc but in the end you just screw the light in,” Meijer told Dezeen. “I wanted to turn that around and let light play the main character. So I wanted to make a lamp series where the design and the shape was about the light.”
Each of the acrylic lamps incorporates an inner and outer strip of LEDs that can be adjusted using a dial or slider to change the colour of the light from a bright white to a warmer red or yellow.
Light from the LEDs spreads across the surface and catches lines that have been milled into the transparent acrylic.
The patterns feature wavy lines that transition into smooth shapes as they radiate from the inner form to the outer edge.
“When I decided that I wanted to change between warm and cool light I thought it was important that when the character of the light changes, the character of the lamp changes as well,” explained Meijer.
“When you see a drawing of a light bulb from the end of the nineteenth century there is always a sort of wave-like pattern, which mimics glowing,” the designer added. “Whereas cool white light is more modern and straight, like the hard line of a fluorescent tube.”
The collection comprises a narrow table lamp, a round table table and a larger wall lamp.
Meijer originally designed the lamps during his studies at Design Academy Eindhoven and is now using them as the basis for experiments on a larger scale, which he says will eventually result in a series of limited edition light sculptures.
German designer Jule Waibel has created 25 of her folded paper dresses for fashion brand Bershka’s shop windows around the world (+ movie).
London
Jule Waibel produces the dresses by hand-pleating large sheets of paper into forms that fit the body. Each takes over ten hours to complete.
London
She was contacted by Bershka with an offer to exhibit 25 dresses in as many of its flagship stores in cities including London, Paris, Milan, Istanbul, Osaka and Mexico City.
“I was excited and shocked at the same time,” Waibel told Dezeen, “25 dresses for 25 shops?!”
Waibel scores the paper horizontally and vertically before folding along the seams, then repeats the process for the diagonal.
Amsterdam, London, Berlin
The two halves of the sheet are printed with a different pattern, one for the bodice and the other for the skirt.
Amsterdam
Most of the dresses are printed with colour gradients, while a few are covered with detailed patterns.
Mexico
Different colours and graphics were used for each of the cities, but Waibel was keen to move away from stereotypical shades and motifs such as the ones used in the countries’ flags.
Berlin
“I found it too obvious to use the typical colours and instead I wanted to try something different,” she explained. “I figured that the people must be bored with seeing the same style all the time.”
Singapore
Her favourites are the black and white design in Paris, the dress patterned with tiny black and orange fish in Berlin and the installation on London’s Oxford Street that appears to glow like lava.
Milan
Waibel and her team spent just over a week producing the garments and a set of accessories at a studio in Barcelona.
Osaka
“Together with my supportive pleating assistants we managed to fold 25 dresses, two bags and two umbrellas within eight tough working days!” she said.
The origami dresses will be installed until 31 January.
“This place used to be a farm; the chickens and the pigs used to walk around here,” says Baas, who we interviewed in his office in the converted attic of the former farmhouse. “Now we turned it into a design studio.”
Maarten Baas’ offices
Baas’ office is home to the original Smoke Chair that he produced for his graduation project while at Design Academy Eindhoven, which is now manufactured by Dutch design brand Moooi.
Maarten Baas’ original Smoke Chair
“This was the prototype on which Moooi based the Smoke Chair,” Baas says. “It’s actually burnt furniture with an epoxy resin that sucks into the charcoal. It has been reproduced many times by Moooi, and still we make unique pieces here at the farm.”
Clay furniture by Maarten Baas
Baas, who moved to the farm in 2009 with fellow designer Bas den Herder, converted the barn into a workshop where he produces other pieces of furniture such as his famous Clay series, created by moulding a synthetic clay around a metal frame.
“We squeeze our hands in the clay, you can see the fingerprints,” explains Baas. “After that, it dries out and it stays like furniture.”
Shooting for Maarten Baas’ Grandmother Clock
Downstairs, Baas is in the middle of filming for his new Grandmother Clock, commissioned by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, in which an old lady seems to draw the time using a marker pen from inside the clock.
Grandfather and Grandmother Clocks by Maarten Baas, presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Design Miami 2013
“You’re very lucky to be here just at the moment that we are filming the new Grandmother Clock,” Baas says. “What you see here is a little cabin in which the grandmother will sit and a video that is recording her. The grandmother will indicate the time every minute with a marker. She will draw the big hand and the small hand and after a minute she wipes away the big hand, does one minute later and like that she goes around the clock.”
Maarten Baas’ homemade sauna in an old wooden caravan
Baas then takes us outside to show us his workshop in the barn, as well as a small sauna he made inside an old wooden caravan, before showing us a limited edition piece of Smoke furniture that is in the process of being charred with a blow-torch.
“This is a chair that we are burning for a client,” Baas starts to say, before having second thoughts about explaining the process in detail. “Ah, f**k it,” he says. “I’m not going to say.”
Maarten Baas. Copyright: Dezeen
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
Design Miami 2013, which took place in Miami from 4 to 8 December alongside the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, featured a large number of vintage furniture pieces by iconic 20th-century designers.
“Design Miami’s intention is to offer a journey through design history,” Goebl explains in the movie. “At the same time we present a strong pillar of contemporary experimental work.”
One of the standout pieces on show this year was a one-room prefabricated house designed by French modernist architect Jean Prouvé, which was on sale for $2.5 million.
“For the first time we have a full-scale architectural structure [at the show], which Jean Prouvé designed in 1945,” Goebl explains.
Prouvé was well-represented throughout the show, but so was the late architect’s frequent collaborator Charlotte Perriand.
“It’s also a year of seminal women designers,” says Goebl. “We have a solo show on Charlotte Perriand, where you can discover an interior that she designed in Paris for the Borot family.”
She continues: “We also have an interior dedicated to Maria Pergay’s furniture made from stainless steel from the 1970s.”
Goebl then goes on to discuss the work of contemporary designers on show, claiming that there is a growing trend towards merging digital and analogue experiences.
Alchemist Lauren Bowker has embedded ink that changes colour depending on different climatic conditions into a feathered garment (+ movie).
Bowker designs clothing and sculptures to demonstrate how the inks she has developed blend from one colour to another depending on the surrounding environment.
Her extravagant PHNX fashion pieces were made from feathers impregnated with the ink, which respond to light, heat and friction so they ripple with changing tones as the wearer moves.
“I chose the feathers because the piece was about the birth of something new and the piece goes through dark phases to light, which is meant to be spiritual,” Bowker told Dezeen at the Wearable Futures conference where she presented the project earlier this week.
PHNX fashion piece
She also collaborated with photographer Ryan Hopkinson to create Valediction, a sculpture made from white leaves covered in thermochromatic ink so they would turn blue when they became hot. When the piece was ignited, the colours mapped the destruction before it occurred.
Bowker began her research by creating a pollution-absorbent ink called PdCl2, which changes colour from yellow to black in dirty conditions then reverts back in fresh air.
At the Royal College of Art she developed the product into ink that can respond to a variety of different environmental conditions.
“I graduated with an ink which is respondent to seven different parameters in the environment,” Bowker said. “Not only will it absorb air pollution, it will change colour to UV, heat, air friction, moisture and more. This gives it the capability to go through the full RGB scale.”
“Each ink works very differently, it depends on what sort of material you want to apply it to,” she added.
The inks can be applied to most materials using various methods, depending on the characteristics of the surface. “You can screen-print it, paint it, spray it, or alternatively you can dye things with it, impregnating the fibres with the colour,” Bowker explained.
After presenting the technology in fashion pieces, it was picked up by a range of companies who asked her to collaborate on projects including a concept aeroplane cabin by Airbus. “Everyone saw this technology and saw their own vision of how they could use it,” said Bowker.
She can customise the inks to change colour in specific places by mapping the conditions at the locations and creating an ink to respond to these parameters.
“If you came to me and said ‘Lauren, I want my silk jersey to change colour when I’m at Oxford Street, then when I’m at Baker Street I want to be a different colour’, I would go out and map the fluctuations in the environment of each tube station then I would create you an ink that responds to those environments,” Bowker said.
Bowker recently set up The Unseen, a design house for biological and chemical technology house to raise awareness of the product and further the applications of her creation by making it more affordable. The company aims to launch a collection using the materials at London Fashion Week in February 2014.
Valediction sculpture
In the future, Bowker hopes the inks will be adopted by the medical industry: “If it goes into a T-shirt that lets you know if you’re going to have an asthma attack, that for me is much more successful than having an amazing fashion collection.”
Bowker presented her work at the Wearable Futures conference at Ravensbourne in London, which concluded yesterday.
Here is some more information from the designer:
Multi-award winning alchemist Lauren Bowker leads prophetic art house The Unseen. Focused on Seeing The Unseen; The Unseen is a luxury design house and consultancy that integrates biological, chemical and electronic technology into fashion, through materials.
Philosophy
“The Unseen believes technology IS magic. My vision is to create a world of seamlessly captivating science; through exquisite couture, luxury products and opulent materials; in lieu of the believer searching for special pieces and unique experiences. To do this I will build a House and environment that both appeal intriguingly and aesthetically. That is well informed, well educated, inventive and sensitive to both Technology and Design. Offering luxury attire enhanced with technical magic that will lead fashion. I trust in the unseen world around us, it can offer beauty, magic and faith. I want others to see what I see.”
Valediction sculpture
Valediction
A collaboration with genius Ryan Hopkinson.
Valediction depicts the burning of a sculpture made entirely from the skeletons of leaves, hand painted in Thermochromic, Heat tracking Pigments to appear blue. The sculpture, once ignited, acts as a mapping tool of its own destruction. The Thermochromatic treatment allows the viewer to witness patterns of heat flux in real time as the leaves combust and the flames propagate. With a starting height of eight feet the sculpture is reduced to nothing within ten seconds leaving only ash and a limited number of high resolution photographs as physical proof of it’s existence. On first glance aesthetic beauty conceals the technology, while the true nature of the sculpture is exposed through destruction by flame. Data is made available and witnessed in real-time, illustrating a new platform for physical visualisation.
PHNX
Through the expansion of many types of ink PHNX is an original take on dynamic chromic imaging. Using existing and vast variables from the immediate human habitat as an external input to the PHNX sensory ink, forming an array of new Chromic materials within natural structures. Resulting in a constructed and dynamically controlled textile that is capable of constantly evolving, continually changing colour state in front of the viewer’s eyes. Inspired by reincarnation and the cycle of life PHNX was intended to enhance the beauty of Technology in materials and the imagination of experimentation within Fashion providing an aesthetic that provokes discourse on beauty of materials in fashion, technology, interaction and data.
Valediction sculpture
PdCl2
The multi award winning PdCl2 ink is designed to treat the symptoms of hazardous lifestyles we live in today. The Chromic Dye is capable of reacting in the presence of carbon emission. Presenting a reversible colour change from yellow to black. The surrounding concept addresses issues in health as a result of passive smoking, logically evolving into a platform that aesthetically visualises environmental conditions. Using Material to offer an innovative language within visual communication.
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Eindhoven, Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma show us their experiments with unusual materials including fish skin, cow bladders, animal blood and even lava.
Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma. Copyright: Dezeen
Italian designers Farresin and Trimarchi, who met at Design Academy Eindhoven and set up Formafantasma in the small Dutch city after graduating, have become well-known for their interesting use of materials.
The duo’s latest project involves melting down volcanic rock from Mount Etna in Sicily.
“We are conducting some really simple experiments by remelting lava,” Farresin tells us when we visited their studio during Dutch Design Week.
Some of Formafantasma’s experiments with melting lava
“We are working with basalt fibres, which is this really interesting material that we found. It is similar to glass fibre, but is entirely produced by the melting of lava. Because of the chemical components of lava, you can create fibres with it.”
Samples Formafantasma made from basalt fibre
Farresin shows us two applications of the material, a textile made from woven threads of basalt fibre as well as a ceramic-like material, which is made from layers of this textile heated in a kiln.
Plate made from basalt rock
“We put it in a ceramic oven and control [the temperature] so that the basalt fibre does not melt completely and turns into a more structural material,” Farresin explains.
“What we like about these skins, which we got from a company in Iceland, is that they have been discarded by the food industry,” he says. “We are actually continuing the investigation of these materials and are [currently] designing a piece for a company using fish skins.”
The Craftica collection also included water containers made from animal bladders, which Trimarchi shows us next.
“These are from cows and, again, they come from the food industry,” he says. “Usually these are used in Italy to make cases for mortadella [an Italian sausage].”
Lighting made from inflated cow baldders
Farresin adds: “We still find the material fascinating, so we thought to use them in lighting. We made a construction using the valve of a bike so that we can basically dry the piece and inflate it directly on the LED light source.”
The first is bois durci, a nineteenth-century plastic made from sawdust and animal blood. Then he shows us pieces of shellac, a natural polymer secreted by lac bugs, a small parasitic insect native to India and Thailand.
Trimarchi says that, since the Botanica project, they have been looking into better methods of producing the material as well as ways of using it.
“Something we are really trying to investigate is to make the production process of shellac more efficient,” he explains.
Farresin adds: “Nowadays it is just farmed by small communities in India and Thailand. We see a parallel between this and silk production, but the farming is really difficult.”
“We are interested in getting in touch with institutions in India to see if we can participate in improving the bug farming there.”
Our MINI Paceman in Eindhoven
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
American artist Phillip K Smith III has added mirrors to the walls of a desert shack in California to create the illusion that you can see right through the building (+ movie).
Photograph by Steve King
Entitled Lucid Stead, the installation was created by Phillip K Smith III on a 70-year-old wooden residence within the California High Desert.
Photograph by Steve King
Mirrored panels alternate with weather-beaten timber siding panels to create horizontal stripes around the outer walls, allowing narrow sections of the building to seemingly disappear into the vast desert landscape.
Photograph by Steve King
“Lucid Stead is about tapping into the quiet and the pace of change of the desert,” said Smith. “When you slow down and align yourself with the desert, the project begins to unfold before you. It reveals that it is about light and shadow, reflected light, projected light, and change.”
Photograph by Steve King
The door and windows of the building are also infilled with mirrors, but after dark they transform into brightly coloured rectangles that subtly change hue, thanks to a system of LED lighting and an Arduino computer system.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
“The colour of the door and window openings are set at a pace of change where one might question whether they are actually changing colours,” said Smith.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
“One might see blue, red, and yellow… and continue to see those colours. But looking down and walking ten feet to a new location reveals that the windows are now orange, purple and green,” he added.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
White light is projected through the walls of the cabin at night, revealing the diagonal cross bracing that forms the building’s interior framework.
Photograph by Steve King
Read on for a project description from the artist:
Artist Phillip K Smith, III creates Lucid Stead light installation in Joshua Tree, CA
After the long, dusty, bumpy, anxious trip out into the far edges of Joshua Tree, you open your car door and for the first time experience the quiet of the desert. It’s at that point that you realise you are in a place that is highly different than where you just came from.
Photograph by Steve King
Lucid Stead is about tapping into the quiet and the pace of change of the desert. When you slow down and align yourself with the desert, the project begins to unfold before you. It reveals that it is about light and shadow, reflected light, projected light, and change.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
In much of my work, I like to interact with the movement of the sun so that the artwork is in a constant state of change from sunrise to 9am to noon to 3am to 6pm and into the evening.
Photograph by Steve King
With Lucid Stead, the movement of the sun reflects banded reflections of light across the desert landscape, while various cracks and openings reveal themselves within the structure. Even the shifting shadow of the entire structure on the desert floor is as present as the massing of the shack itself, within the raw canvas of the desert.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
The desert itself is as used as reflected light…as actual material within this project. It is a medium that is being placed onto the skin of the 70-year old homesteader shack.
Photograph by Steve King
The reflections, contained within their crisp, geometric bands and rectangles contrasts with the splintering bone-dry wood siding.
Photograph by Lou Mora
This contrast is a commonality in my work, where I often merge highly precise, geometric, zero tolerance forms with material or experience that is highly organic or in a state of change…something that you cannot hold on to… that slips between your fingers.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Projected light emerges at dusk and moves into the evening. The four window openings and the doorway of Lucid Stead all become crisp rectangular fields of colour, floating in the desert night.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
White light, projected from the inside of the shack outward, highlights the cracks between the mirrored siding and the wood siding, wrapping the shack in lines of light. This white light reveals, through silhouette, the structure of the shack itself as the 2×4’s and diagonal bracing become present on the skin of the shack.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
The colour of the door and window openings are set at a pace of change where one might question whether they are actually changing colours. One might see blue, red, and yellow… and continue to see those colours. But looking down and walking ten feet to a new location reveals that the windows are now orange, purple and green.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
This questioning of and awareness of change, ultimately, is about the alignment of this project with the pace of change occurring within the desert. Through the process of slowing down and opening yourself to the quiet, only then can you really see and hear in ways that you normally could not.
This synthetic biology project by designer Ai Hasegawa imagines that a woman could gestate and give birth to a baby from another species, in this case a dolphin, before eating it (+ movie).
I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin… was developed by Ai Hasegawa to tackle food shortages and satisfy maternal instincts as the human population burgeons by giving women the option to become surrogates for endangered animals hunted for food.
Hasegawa proposes synthesising a placenta that could support an animal in a human womb.
“This project approaches the problem of human reproduction in an age of overcrowding, overdevelopment and environmental crisis,” Hasegawa said. “With potential food shortages and a population of nearly seven billion people, would a woman consider incubating and giving birth to an endangered species such as a shark, tuna or dolphin?”
The designer also questions whether someone would feel differently about eating a delicacy having personally carried and nurtured it.
“Would raising this animal as a child change its value so drastically that we would be unable to consume it because it would be imbued with the love of motherhood?” asked Hasegawa.
As a case study for the concept Hasegawa chose the Maui’s dolphin, one of the world’s smallest and most rare species of dolphin that has been critically endangered as a consequence of human fishing.
A Maui’s dolphin is roughly the same size as a human baby and is regarded as highly intelligent.
For a woman to gestate a dolphin, Hasegawa proposes biologically modifying a placenta to prevent the passage of antibodies from mother to baby that attack non-human cells.
“The placenta originates from the baby’s side, which in this case is a dolphin, and not from the human side,” said Hasegawa. “This avoids the ethical and legal difficulties associated with reproductive research involving human eggs.”
The “dolp-human” placenta would be altered to distinguish between mammal and non-mammal cells, rather than human and other cells, so the foetus would escape attack from the antibodies.
After birth, the mother would have to administer fat-rich synthesised milk to the baby to build it’s immune system, which a dolphin would naturally get from its mother’s milk rather than via the placenta.
Humans are genetically predisposed to raise children as a way of passing on their genes to the next generation. For some, the struggle to raise a child in decent conditions is becoming harder due to gross overpopulation and an increasingly strained global environment.
This project approaches the problem of human reproduction in an age of overcrowding, overdevelopment and environmental crisis. With potential food shortages and a population of nearly seven billion people, would a woman consider incubating and giving birth to an endangered species such as a shark, tuna or dolphin? This project introduces the argument for giving birth to our food to satisfy our demands for nutrition and childbirth, and discusses some of the technical details of how this might be possible.
Would raising this animal as a child change its value so drastically that we would be unable to consume it because it would be imbued with the love of motherhood? The Maui’s dolphin has been chosen as the ideal “baby” for this piece. It is one of the world’s rarest and smallest dolphins, classified critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation’s Red List of Threatened Species (version 2.3) because of the side effects of fishing activity by humans, its size (which closely matches the size of a human baby), and its high intelligence level and communication abilities.
I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin… imagines a point in the future, where humans will help this species by the advanced technology of synthetic biology. A “dolp-human placenta” that allows a human female to deliver a dolphin is created, and thus humans can become a surrogate mother to endangered species. Furthermore, gourmets would be able to enjoy the luxury of eating a rare animal: an animal made by their own body, raising questions of the ownership of rare animal life, and life itself.
To make it possible for a human mother to deliver a dolphin from her womb, there is a need to synthesise “The Dolp-human Placenta”. The usual human placenta interacts to pass from mother to baby oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, hormones, antibodies (Immunoglobulin Gamma, IgG) and so on. The Dolp-human placenta blocks the delivery of IgG to the baby.
The placenta originates from the baby’s side, which in this case is a dolphin, and not from the human side. This avoids the ethical and legal difficulties associated with reproductive research involving human eggs.
The decidua is formed by implantation of the egg. Usually, foreign cells in the body (for example from other individuals) are attacked by the immune system, but inside the decidua they are tolerated. However, even though the decidua accepts cells from other individuals, non-human cells would still be attacked. In the dolp-human placenta case, it has been modified to distinguish mammal from non-mammal cells, making it even more tolerant.
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