Klarenbeek‘s Mycelium chair, which takes its name from the extensive threadlike root structure of fungi, combines organic matter with bioplastics to make a light and strong composite material that can be 3D-printed.
Scale model of Mycelium chair
Klarenbeek found that fungus grows quickly on straw, so used powdered straw mixed with water and mycelium to make an aggregate that could be 3D-printed.
Eric Klarenbeek with model of the Mycelium chair
“We adapted the 3D-printer and invented a way to print straw injected with mycelium. By infusing this mushroom it acts as a kind of glue so that all these straw parts [combine] together and as soon as you dry it you get a kind of cork material, which is all bound together,” says Klarenbeek.
Eric Klarenbeek with prototypes
The chair’s exterior is also 3D-printed, but is made from a bioplastic, against which the mycelium root structure grows. Klarenbeek leaves the fungus to spread throughout the 3D-printed structure, reinforcing it in the process.
Segment of Mycelium chair
“Our main purpose was to find a combination between the robot, or the machine, and to have these two work together to create a new material which could be applicable for any product,” explains Klarenbeek.
Scale model of the Mycelium chair
He claims the material has many possible applications. “It could be a table, or a whole interior, and that’s where it becomes interesting for me. It’s really strong, solid, lightweight and insulating, so we could build a house!”
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: wearable technology will revolutionise healthcare for doctors and patients alike, says the director of design studio Vitamins in our final movie from December’s Wearable Futures conference.
The QardioArm blood pressure monitor by Qardio
“In the future there’s no doubt that wearable technologies are going to be part of our everyday lives,” says Duncan Fitzsimons of Vitamins. Increased usage of personal health-monitoring devices will be one example of this, he says, making the “the doctor-patient relationship change [for the] better”.
The QardioArm blood pressure monitor
Fitzsimons explains how the current constraints on an appointment between patient and doctor – lack of time and lack of information – can be mitigated by personal monitoring devices that collect patient data over a long period of time.
“When we are ill at the moment we only see the doctor for a very small amount of time. This is just a snapshot in the progress of your illness,” he says.
The QardioArm blood pressure monitor in use
“If [a doctor] has access to a wider amount of data, they’ll be able to see how your illness has started, progressed and perhaps is tailing off,” he continues. “That will enable them to have a lot more information to diagnose you better and also enable you to have a more transparent window into your health so that you can understand it better as well.”
The QardioArm blood pressure monitor is designed to be easily portable
For these benefits to be realised, Fitzsimons says the technology to record this data needs to be attractive and easy to use, citing two examples of products by healthcare company Qardio: the QardioArm, which measures blood pressure and the QardioCore, a wearable ECG (electrocardiogram) monitoring device, commonly used to detect abnormal heart rhythms. Both are designed, says Fitzsimons, to look unlike medical devices and use a smartphone as the interface with the patient.
[The above paragraph was amended on 27 February 2014. Previously, it was stated that Vitamins would be launching the QardioArm and QardioCore products.]
The QardioCore ECG monitor
Fitzsimons is the co-founder of Vitamins, the design studio which last year won the transport category at the Design Museum Designs of the Year 2013 awards for its Folding Wheel project.
This is the fifth and final movie from the two-day Wearable Futures conference that explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.
“We see a lot of exciting [wearable technology] projects, a lot of design prototyping going on,” says van Dongen, who was speaking at the Wearable Futures conference held in December at Ravensbourne. “It’s really amazing how quickly things are evolving.”
Pauline van Dongen’s Solar Wear dress
Despite this, van Dongen says that unless the resulting products are comfortable and visually appealing fashion pieces in their own right, they won’t take off.
“It’s very important to stress the wearability,” she says. “I think it’s the only way to connect to the market, to connect to people and to transcend the realm of gadgets.”
Pauline van Dongen’s Solar Wear dress
Van Dongen launched her womenswear label, which specialises in combining fashion and technology, in 2010. Her Wearable Solar range consists of a dress that incorporates 72 flexible solar panels as well as a coat that has 48 rigid crystalline solar cells.
“Both prototypes have a modular element where you can reveal the solar panels when the sun shines but you can also hide them and wear them close to your body,”she explains. “When you wear them in full sun for one hour they can generate enough energy to charge your typical smartphone 50 percent.”
Pauline van Dongen’s Solar Wear coat
Van Dongen is aware that there will be significant production challenges to overcome before products like hers become commercially viable.
“It’s important to think how all these new designs can be integrated into the production chain,” she says. “An important next step to take wearable technology to another level is to look at the commercialisation of it.”
Pauline van Dongen’s Solar Wear coat
This is the fourth movie from the two-day Wearable Futures conference that explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: scientists are combining non-living chemicals to create materials with the properties of living organisms, says the creator of a self-repairing shoe made from protocells.
Shamees Aden. Copyright: Dezeen
Protocells, as the chemical cocktails are known, are made by mixing basic non-living molecules in lab conditions. These then combine to create substances that exhibit some of the characteristics of living cells: the ability to metabolise food, to move and to reproduce.
In this movie Dezeen filmed at the Wearable Futures conference in December, designer and materials researcher Shamees Aden explains how “scientists are now mixing together groups of chemicals [to make] them behave like living cells. They are able to reconfigure, they are able to adapt to light, pressure and heat.”
The synthetic production of living materials is so far limited to basic applications – modifying the behaviour of oil droplets in a water solution, for example – but Aden has developed a proposal that uses protocells to make self-regenerating soles for a pair of running shoes.
The Amoeba running shoes designed by Aden use protocells’ capabilities of responding to pressure, and inflates or deflates according to the texture of ground the wearer is running on to provide more or less cushioning.
Photocells, which have a limited life span, would be replenished after each run, explains Aden. “Your shoe box would be a vessel which would hold the [protocell] liquid inside. You could buy your protocell liquid and it would be dyed any colour you like and you would pour that in and as the shoe is rejuvenated the colours would emerge.”
The speculative project is the result of a collaboration with chemist Dr Michael Hanczyc of the Institute of Physics and Chemistry and the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) in Denmark, who has worked extensively on protocells.
“At this point it is a speculative design project but it is grounded in real science and it could be in production by 2050,” says Aden.
Visualisation of protocells forming
This is the third movie from the two-day Wearable Futures conference that explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.
Visualisation of protocell production
In the first movie, designer of Dita von Teese’s 3D-printed gown Francis Bitonti explained how advances in design software mean “materials are becoming media”. In the second, Suzanne Lee explained how she makes clothes “grown using bacteria.”
Speaking about the development of the dress at the Wearable Futures conference in London in December, Bitonti says that developments in computer-based design and 3D printing mean that designers are no longer limited by their knowledge of materials.
“The separation between what you can simulate and what you can physically model is gone”, claims Bitonti, founder of New York luxury fashion studio Francis Bitonti Studio.
Francis Bitonti with Dita von Teese wearing the 3D-printed dress he and Michael Schmidt created for her
Von Teese premiered the 3D-printed dress designed by Bitonti and designer Michael Schmidt at the Ace Hotel in New York in March last year and it became one of the most talked-about fashion stories of the year.
“One of the things we’ve been noticing is that materials are becoming media. I’m not operating on materials, I’m operating on animations, I’m operating on video, I’m operating on pixels and polygons. [The design process] is a lot closer to creating a hollywood film than it is making an aluminium cylinder,” says Bitonti.
Modelling the Dita von Teese dress
Possibilities are now limited by the designer’s imagination rather than material constraints, Bitonti says. “What I’m finding every day is that I can make anything I can draw. And I can make something behave any way I can imagine it behaving. The gap closes every day.”
Modelling the Dita von Teese dress by Francis Bitonti
Prior to launching Francis Bitonti Studio, Bitonti trained as an architect. He says this background proved useful when designing the figure-hugging dress for the American model and burlesque dancer Dita von Teese.
Manufacturing one of the pieces of the Dita von Teese dress
“I found that developing a second skin for the body wasn’t really that much different from thinking about a building facade. It’s about breaking up shapes in pretty much the same way,” he says.
The seamless dress, which he developed last year, was made out of 3000 unique moving parts made using selective laser sintering (SLS), where material is built up in layers from plastic powder fused together with a laser.
Manufacturing one of the pieces of the Dita von Teese dress
The two-day Wearable Futures conference explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.
Detail of the DIta von Teese dress
Bitonti is not the only designer exploring the fashion possibilities of 3D-printing.
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: Suzanne Lee of BioCouture explains how she makes clothes that are “grown using bacteria” in this movie filmed at the Wearable Futures conference in London in December.
Suzanne Lee
“There’s a whole spectrum of organisms that can grow material,” says Lee, who founded BioCouture to explore how organisms like bacteria, yeast, fungi and algae could be harnessed to produce fabrics.
Lee showed the Wearable Futures audience a range of jackets and shoes made from bio-materials produced by bacteria in a vat of liquid to produce bacterial cellulose – a material that has similar properties to leather.
BioBomber jacket
“The recipe that I’ve been exploring to grow a piece of clothing is using a symbiotic mix of yeast and bacteria,” she said. “It’s a fermentation method that grows you bacterial cellulose. It’s kind of like a vegetable leather if you like.”
She adds: “What attracts me to it is that it’s compostable. It’s not just biodegradable, it’s compostable. So you could throw it away like you would your vegetable peelings.”
BioCouture BioShoe
BioCouture is a London-based design consultancy that is pioneering the use of bio-materials for the fashion, sportswear and luxury sectors.
Lee is a former senior research fellow at the School of Fashion & Textiles at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, and author of the 2007 book Fashioning The Future: tomorrow’s wardrobe, which was the first publication to explore how technology could transform fashion.
BioCouture Bioshoe
“Through an engagement with biology I’m really excited about how we can think about organisms like microbes as the factories of the future,” says Lee. “What most people know BioCouture for is a series of garments that were grown using bacteria. So the fibres, the material itself and the formation of the garment has been done by a microbe rather than a plant.”
In future, Lee believes that clothing materials themselves could be living organisms that could work symbiotically with the body to nourish it and even monitor it for signs of disease.
“What we have right now are living organisms making us materials, but then the organism is killed and the material just exists like any other,” she says.
BioCouture BioSkirt. Photograph by House Of Radon
“But I can imagine that we will eventually move towards the material itself being living while it’s on you, and having a direct relationship to your whole body in this happy micro-biome environment and perhaps diagnosing and treating, nourishing in some way the body surface so becoming part of your wellbeing.”
The two-day Wearable Futures conference explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.
“I think augmented reality and virtual reality will essentially converge into the same thing”, says Millns.
The co-founder of Inition explains that the next generation of appliances will blur the once-clear distinction between augmented technology devices like Google Glass and virtual reality devices like the Oculus Rift headset.
“There’s two strains of headsets: the Google Glass-type which only gives you a small image in the corner of your field of view.” says Millns, referring to Google’s augmented reality spectacles which can overlay digital information like maps and internet searches into the user’s field of vision.
A view through Google Glass
“The other strain is the Oculus Rift type, which is designed to replace the entire world and give you a high resolution and the biggest picture possible.” says Millns, referring to the strap-on motion-responsive virtual reality googles from Oculus VR.
Oculus Rift headset: an example of a virtual reality device
“Eventually those two things will converge [into] some sort of contact lens which goes in your eye and does both of those things. It will give you a huge image at high resolution but also the ability to see through and mix images with the real world”, says Millns.
Artist’s impression of an everyday augmented reality view, for Google Glass
Millns also predicts that the integration between displays and humans will become tighter and tighter, leading to what he calls a “cyborg situation where you have something embedded inside your brain that has a direct interface to your visual cortex.”
Augmented reality devices that are tiny enough to “sit in your eye” will soon add layers of digital information over the real world, says Millns.
Users will be able to see whole cities with information layered on top of them via tiny devices placed in the eye, completely changing their urban experience, he claims.
“When we can track natural features in the city we can [then] bring in all sorts of information layered on to the urban view.” This could include information related to travel, shopping, the proximity of friends and so on.
This augmented reality app in an iPad tracks the printed pattern on the podium to generate a 3D architectural model
The adoption of this technology will be helped by the second major development Millns predicts.
“Most augmented reality so far [works] using a two-dimensional flat marker,” says Millns, referring to 2D-printed marker patterns that interface with digital models on devices like iPads to render augmented reality views.
This tracking method limits augmented reality to fairly rudimentary usages – but not for long.
One of Zaha Hadid Architects’ models tracked by an augmented reality app
“In the future we won’t need [to use] two-dimensional specific markers, the augmented reality app will just track the natural environment”, he says.
Couple this with more sophisticated viewing technologies, and the use of augmented reality will soar, Millns claims: “When we have devices that just sit in your eye and it’s not obvious you are wearing them – that’s when augmented reality will really take off.”
Augmented reality rendering of Zaha Hadid Architects’ model
Today’s augmented reality relies on an intermediary device such as a smartphone or tablet, on which the user sees an “augmented” version of the world.
“One example of using augmented reality that people might be familiar with is using a tablet,” says Millns. “We use a live image via the camera and we layer on objects to make them appear as if they are really there.”
The augmented reality Dezeen Watch Store pop-up allows customers to virtually try on a range of watches. By wrapping a paper “marker” around their wrist and looking at a screen, customers can see the watches modelled on their wrists in real time.
Customers can also explore an augmented reality scale model of Zaha Hadid Architects’ 90-metre Jazz superyacht using a tablet computer.
By pointing an iPad at a printed marker resting on a platform, they can view and walk round the yacht as if it was really there.
Augmented reality models are used for medical research and teaching
Based in Shoreditch, east London, Inition specialises in using new technologies such as virtual and augmented reality to create a range of experiences and installations.
Inition has built augmented reality models for several developers to help promote their buildings as well as architects, including Zaha Hadid for whom they developed a model which explored the effects of different airflows and lighting on the building.
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: in our first movie looking at the interface between design and technology, Andy Millns of 3D production company Inition claims virtual reality will soon become almost indistinguishable from the real world.
Based in Shoreditch, east London, Inition specialises in using new technologies such as virtual reality to create a range of experiences and installations.
“Virtual reality was the technology that set me off on this career path in the first place,” says Millns. “I was absolutely obsessed with virtual reality in the early nineties; now it’s very exciting that the hardware has finally got to the point where the experience matches people’s expectations.”
The studio has been working with the developer version of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that was announced on crowd-funding website Kickstarter in 2012. The consumer version is currently in development and expected to launch this year.
“Oculus Rift has been sort of the poster child for virtual reality,” says Millns, before going on to explain how straightforward the device is. “What you’ve got essentially is a seven-inch mobile phone-type screen and two lenses. It’s that simple.”
The developer version of Oculus Rift has a very low-resolution screen, but with the pixel density of mobile phone screens rapidly increasing, Millns says it won’t be long before virtual reality becomes as life-like as the real world.
“We’re going to see this year a headset where it’s starting to get quite difficult to distinguish whether you’re actually wearing a headset or not,” he says. “When we start to get super-high-resolution headsets with the type of display technology that we’re seeing on the market now, it’s gong to blur the line between what is reality and what is virtual.”
It’s most recent project using the Oculus Rift device was a collaboration with the fashion designer Gareth Pugh called Monolith, which was installed last month at Selfridges for the London department store’s Festival of Imagination.
Visitors entered a soundproofed booth and put on a special helmet, which transported them on a virtual reality journey through monochromatic cityscapes populated by ghostly figures based on the sculptural costumes Pugh created for the Royal Ballet.
“You walk into the store, put the headset on and you’re immersed in a three-minute experience inside the world of Gareth Pugh,” Millns explains.
Today we’re launching Dezeen and MINI Frontiers – a major, year-long collaboration with MINI that will explore how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.
Subtitled “Where design and technology connect”, Dezeen and MINI Frontiers will take us on a journey of discovery. Through a series of videos we’ll be speaking to the most interesting, established and emerging talents from around the world who are working at the frontiers of these disciplines.
We’ll be investigating the way that connectivity between previously separate disciplines is creating new hybrids, new originals and new ways of working that promise to change for the better the way we live and work.
We look forward to sharing our discoveries with you over the next 12 months.
Look out for our first movie tomorrow, in which Andy Millns of 3D technology company Inition discusses how virtual reality is fast becoming as life-like as the real world.
In September we’ll be teaming up with six leading creatives to explore the future of mobility in an exhibition at London Design Festival – details to be announced soon.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
