Hasta La Ideas

News: 3D-printed eye cells could “aid in the cure of blindness” according to researchers at The University of Cambridge, who have successfully printed adult nerve cells for the first time.

The researchers used an inkjet printer to print living retinal cells of adult rats, which could be built up and used to create replacements for defective eye tissues.

“This is the first time that cells from the adult central nervous system have been successfully printed,” professor Keith Martin told Dezeen. “We’ve demonstrated that you can take cells from the retina and you can effectively separate them out. These can be put in an inkjet printer and we can print those cells out in any pattern we like and we’ve shown that those cells can survive and thrive.”

Martin and his colleagues at Cambridge’s neuroscience department, Wen-Kai Haiso and Barbara Lorber, published their findings in research journal Biofabrication yesterday.

“[This] is an important step in the development of tissue grafts for regenerative medicine and may aid in the cure of blindness,” said the article.

Martin hopes the development is a step towards treating retinal diseases such as glaucoma and macular degeneration, the two biggest causes of blindness in the UK.

Their study is the first to show that retinal ganglion cells, which transmit signals from the eye to the brain, and glial cells that support this process can be printed in layers on top of each other without damaging them.

“The retina is a multi-layered structure,” said Martin. “We’ve shown that we can put down at least two layers so we can put down glial cells and 3D print retinal ganglion cells over the top.”

The team found that the cells weren’t distorted when fired out of the printer at high speed, counter to predictions.

“Effectively you can fire these cells at about 30 miles per hour and they survive that perfectly well,” said Martin. “[This] was a real surprise to us because we didn’t expect the cells to be able to survive being fired out of a cannon.”

Having successfully printed a layer of nerve cells and a layer of support cells, Martin says that the next step will be to print multiple layers to build up a full retina.

“What we’re looking to do now is to develop this towards ways of repairing the retina,” he told us. “With time there’s no reason why you can’t print multiple different cell types in the same way that you print multiple different colours of ink. Building up 3D structures is the next step.”

Martin envisages that this could be done either by engineering a retina on a synthetic membrane or similar support structure and implanting it into the eye or by developing tools that would allow the printed cells to be sprayed onto the back of the eye.

“There have been really amazing advances with stem cell transplantation in the eye so this is a complementary technology that may be able to solve the problems we have with retinal repair,” he said.

Although human trials are a way off yet, Martin believes that these advances are opening possibilities for curing not just retinal problems but other neural conditions.

“This is a step forward and we’re working hard to develop this technology for human use,” he said. “We’re looking to develop this for other parts of neural repair.”

Last month we reported that 3D-printed prosthetic eyes have been developed, which could be produced much faster than existing handmade versions – reducing the cost by 97 percent.

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News: the architecture and design department at the V&A museum in London has acquired Katy Perry Lashes (pictured) and Primark jeans as part of a new “rapid response” strategy for collecting objects as soon as they become newsworthy, to reflect the changing way fast-moving global events influence society (+ interview).

The V&A is thought to be the first major museum in the world to adopt such a strategy, which is radically different from traditional methods for curating design and manufactured objects.

“The rapid response collecting strategy is a new strand to the V&A museum’s collections policy, which can respond very quickly to events relevant to design and technology,” senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital Kieran Long told Dezeen.

Items acquired under the scheme so far include the Katy Perry Lashes that Long examined in his most recent Opinion column for Dezeen, the first 3D-printed gun and a pair of jeans purchased from high-street retailer Primark that were made near the Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which collapsed earlier this year.

Whereas the museum has traditionally collected objects that have already earned their place in design history over time through their inclusion in books and exhibitions, this new strategy allows the curators to respond immediately to contemporary issues.

“We felt that the world works a little bit differently these days,” Long explained. “There are global events that take place and have a bearing on the world of design and manufacturing, which give certain objects a certain relevance at that moment.”

The strategy is being shown for the first time through an exhibition at the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.

Long and colleague Corinna Gardner invited Shenzhen citizens to choose an everyday object that could tell a visitor something important about present-day Shenzhen. “These objects together tell a story about that city in this moment and offer a broader, more wide-ranging portrait of one of the most interesting, fast-changing cities in the world today,” said Gardner.

One of the objects on show is a bra without underwire. “Shenzhen is the electronic manufacturing hub of the world and many of the factory workers are female,” Gardner said. She explained that security checks on the way in and out of the factory usually involve a metal detector so workers choose to wear non-underwired bras in order to avoid beeping on the way through and having to undergo a physical search, where there is a a high rate of abuse.

“For me, the idea that a non-underwired bra is a valued currency in Shenzhen is a design narrative that tells you about the sexual politics of manufacturing in that city,” added Gardner.

One of the benefits of this new approach is that the museum preserves objects that have little value and would therefore otherwise disappear.

“Sometimes it can be these very banal objects that can go away and are impossible to retrieve, because lots of valuable things are kept by people,” said Long. “The kinds of things that Corinna [Gardner] was collecting in Shenzhen, if you tried to do that in two years time, you wouldn’t find those things. They would have gone because the city changes so fast.”

The exhibition continues in Shenzhen as part of the Biennale until February. From April the V&A will dedicate a new space in its twentieth-century galleries at the museum in London to displaying objects they’ve collected with the Rapid Response approach.

Long joined the V&A at the beginning of this year following a career in architecture journalism and a role as assistant director to David Chipperfield at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. In his first Opinion column for Dezeen, he called for an overhaul of the way design is curated in the twenty-first century and set out “95 Theses” for contemporary curation.

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Kieran Long:

Rose Etherington: What is rapid response curating?

Kieran Long: The rapid response collecting strategy is a new strand to the V&A museum’s collections policy, which can respond very quickly to events relevant to design and technology. The traditional way that the V&A collects objects is based on the idea that an object would prove its value over time by becoming a part of design history, being frequently cited in books and so on. These ways of proving an item’s value obviously take time.

We felt that the world works a little bit differently these days. There are global events that take place and have a bearing on the world of design and manufacturing, which give certain objects a certain relevance at that moment.

Rose Etherington: Can you give me an example?

Kieran Long: One example I have here in my office is a pair of Primark jeans. These jeans were made around the Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which collapsed in April this year, killing a thousand people. Those Primark jeans wouldn’t usually enter our fashion collections. Knowing that they were made in that factory, however, gives them a particular relevance and tells us something about contemporary manufacturing and about building codes in Bangladesh, about western consumerism, about lots of issues.

We thought that if we had those jeans in the museum, the day after that event, there’s something very visceral about that and the object’s ability to tell that story.

Rose Etherington: Was acquiring the 3D-printed gun an early application of this strategy?

Kieran Long: 

When Cody Wilson released the plans of the gun online, that was the moment that design changed. If we had had the rapid response strategy then, we would have printed one the next day probably and just got it on display immediately.

Rose Etherington: What else would you file under rapid response?

Kieran Long: This year The Telegraph newspaper ran some stories about working conditions in Tesco distribution warehouses. One of the things that they were talking about were the WT4000 wearable devices manufactured by Motorola that people in their distribution warehouses would wear. Basically they measure how many times you put something in a box on a production line.

Whenever I show this product, people are shocked that we think of wearable technology as the lovely things that you publish on Dezeen like Nike Fuel bands. Actually wearable technology is a reality for thousands of working people in this country. It’s a kind of neo-Fordist, time and motion study-type device that means people can get fired if they don’t put enough things in a box. A brilliant piece of industrial design but also a very frightening one.

Rose Etherington: What does this mean for the role of the curator?

Kieran Long: I don’t think it’s really any different to any traditional role of the expert curator in some ways. We are not stopping anybody from collecting in any way that the V&A has always collected. It’s just about moving more quickly and responding to events in the world. 
We have the tremendous luxury of being paid to develop rigorous world-class expertise about the objects that we collect.

I think that time and that investment we put into the expertise should also be focused not just on beautiful objects by famous designers and by leading artists, but also we should be looking at views of social and cultural change about manufacturing, about global supply chains, about things that really are a part of design and manufacturing that affect the lives of many people all over the world.

Rose Etherington: Does it also mean looking in other places for objects to collect than a curator traditionally would?

Kieran Long: Yes. It’s quite interesting, every time I talk about rapid response collecting internally, you find that some people in the history of the V&A museum have always done it this way. In 1989 when the Iron Curtain came down there was a big moment when the prints collection here collected a whole range of propaganda posters for the ex-USSR and the GDR and so on because they had the understanding that these things would disappear.

With the removal of that barrier, this Russian propaganda stuff became very important, so we now have one of the few complete collections in the world of propaganda posters and this kind of material. That was brilliant thinking, very reactive and very timely.

Rose Etherington: How will the objects collected with the rapid response method be displayed within the V&A museum?

Kieran Long: From April 2014 we’ll have a modest space by the twentieth-century galleries. We’ll have six cases that we will be able to use for these objects. People will come in and see things that have been in the news, things that have just rolled off the production line and been made into prototypes.

Rose Etherington: Do you think that the V&A’s future visitors will want to see Primark jeans?

Kieran Long: One of the things you realise when you work in an institution like the V&A, with 160 years of history, is you do think about the long term and I really believe people will look back and want to find a pair of Primark jeans in our collection. I really believe that. They will look back in the archives and newspapers and they will know the size of that business and the dominant position they have on the high street. Sometimes it can be these very banal objects that can go away and are impossible to retrieve, because lots of valuable things are kept by people.

The kinds of things that Corinna [Gardner] was collecting in Shenzhen, if you tried to do that in two years time, you wouldn’t find those things. They would have gone because the city changes so fast. Things are very fragile and not given value by people. What a great role for a museum to keep safe the things that might not otherwise be safe.

Rose Etherington: How does this fit into the V&A museum’s history?

Kieran Long: The museum itself is very self-consciousness about the way it does collect and document it’s own history. Hopefully people will look back and say there was this moment when the V&A got this new team with Kieran Long, Corinna Gardner, Louise Shannon and Rory Hyde and they all sat around and they had this new idea. They all stuck around for five or ten years and here is the group of things that they collected.

There are examples of that throughout the museum’s history. The famous circulation department of the 1950s and 1960s were collecting contemporary things in a really innovative way and that department was closed and integrated into other departments, but people are now doing PhDs about their work. They hold them up as an innovative, leading-edge group of thinkers at that time. Of course we aspire to that and we’re ambitious, and we want to be a part of this great museum’s history.

Rose Etherington: What about picking things which seem a good idea at the time but history processes otherwise?

Kieran Long: 

We may be wrong on some decisions but as long as we’re rigorous and careful and we follow our own parameters, it will have interest.

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of new “rapid response collecting” strategy appeared first on Dezeen.

Famous for their collaboration on the iconic Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1977 (pictured), Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano both feature as the letter R in our A-Zdvent calendar of architects. Italian architect Piano recently completed an extension to Louis Khan’s Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, while Rogers’ London firm has just won a competition to design a new centre for social sciences at the London School of Economics.

See more architecture by Richard Rogers »
See more architecture by Renzo Piano »

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Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano appeared first on Dezeen.

Strange hollow figures made from folded pieces of carpet line the walls of this exhibition at Galerie Michel Rein in Paris by Portuguese artist Didier Faustino (+ slideshow).

Didier Faustino used low-cost materials including second hand rugs and carpets from trade suppliers to create the empty suits for the exhibition, which is titled We Can’t Go Home Again.

Some of the figures are made with the carpet backing facing outwards and the coloured surface visible through various holes where the face, hands and feet would be, while others feature colourful exteriors.

“The exhibition We Can’t Go Home Again mobilises the signs of our familiar environment but strives to turn it inside out literally like a glove, projecting the visitor into an unstable universe,” said Galerie Michel Rein.

Most of the figures are held together using cable ties, but coarse string connects the pieces of an oriental rug that form a figure lying in the centre of one of the spaces.

The folded forms resembling soft suits of armour are supported by an internal metal framework.

Also included in the show is a large artwork comprising a wrinkled metallic sheet positioned against a wall with a board featuring the phrase “the show must go home” in cutout letters leaning against it.

The exhibition is on show at Galerie Michel Rein until 11 January 2014.

Photography is by Florian Kleinefenn.

Here’s a press release from Galerie Miche Rein:

Didier Faustino – We Can’t Go Home Again

For his second solo show at Michel Rein (after The Wild Things, 2011), Didier Faustino invites us to step outside of our homes and penetrate an ambiguous world, which strangely resembles our own but is haunted by other versions of us bearing armour built from the materials of our own homes.

The exhibition We Can’t Go Home Again mobilises the signs of our familiar environment but strives to turn it inside out literally like a glove, projecting the visitor into an unstable universe. Alternately summoning Absalon, in particular his series Cells, and the performances where Joseph Beuys, wrapped up in his felt cover, shuts himself away in a gallery, Didier Faustino’s exhibition plays on the motives of hindrance, movement and inversion.

The semantics of the titles beckon to be heard. The name Home reoccurs like a litany which is apparently gentle and discreetly discordant. In this manner the show must not “go on”, as the saying goes, but rather “go home” (The Show Must Go Home). This home is however declared inaccessible (We Can’t Go Home Again), and its proverbial sweetness has transformed into a suit (Home Suit Home). Whilst circulating between these titles, the meaning shifts, themes of habitat and comfort rub up against those of appearance and the irreversible.

However, the installation is characterised by its reversibility. In the same way that the home finds itself alternately represented as a dwelling to occupy and an impossible destination, the anthropomorphic figures occupying the main space of the gallery constitute both interiors and exteriors, containers and contents. They invoke strange stories: which man is of the type who’s made himself from this soft armour? Against which insidious peril? Against what disaster is he looking to survive? Which sophisticated means enabled him to design the skilful patron?

Protection built from typical flooring of our abodes shows the opposite and seems to both arm against the dangers and point out their nature. Our models of home, our way of organising and housing our bodies, our spectacular edifices and the constraints opposed to our flesh are all effectively concerned here. Didier Faustino’s combinations somewhat toughen the architectural intention, to a point which expresses a categorical criticism of domestic planning.

If we recognise the transgressive relationship of the artist to architecture, we also find the worrying strangeness which characterises his work as a visual artist.

Multiplying effects on meaning, the pieces of the installation lie within a resolutely experimental and multiform work in progress, which maintains a brotherly relationship with the unfinished opus of the film-director Nicholas Ray, to whom the exhibition’s title pays homage.

Strangely worried in front of our flats and our offices, which have suddenly been made inhospitable, we are led to think of the lives which light up our familiar decor and of the fictional borders which supposedly separate art from our lives and political decisions from our esthetical models.

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Faustino exhibited in Paris appeared first on Dezeen.

Lani Devine of Australian accessories label Her Royal Flyness has designed a colour-coordinated kit for jilted women, containing all the tools they need to take revenge on their ex-boyfriends in style.

The Ex-Boyfriend Revenge Kit is displayed on the Sydney-based company’s online store, and comprises a teal woven leather tote bag from the Her Royal Flyness collection, accompanied by tools and weapons that could be used to break into an ex-boyfriend’s property, subdue and punish them.

Designer and Her Royal Flyness owner Lani Devine insists that the project is conceptual and is intended to provoke discussion. “We don’t promote any type of real life violence to anyone,” she told Dezeen. “The kit will never actually be sold in any way or form and we never intended it to be. It was purely an exercise in design for us that turned out being quite visually interesting.”

Most of the items contained in the bag, including a balaclava, a crowbar, rope and leather gloves, are finished in a matching shade of teal and are designed to look as stylish as fashion accessories. The set also contains a pair of resin knuckledusters and an injection kit with a single shot of truth serum.

“From a design perspective we wanted to explore the idea of how things that are usually deemed dangerous might look if they were designed with a much more elegant approach,” said Devine. “Would they seem less dangerous? Or would they be even more intimidating? Would they actually go with our bag as an ensemble? How much would something like that sell for?”

Devine explained that posting the “limited edition” set on her site, with a hypothetical price of $1850, was intended to provoke discussion and promote her genuine products. Attempting to buy the kit prompts an error message explaining that the product is out of stock.

“Designing all the pieces and actually working out what would be in the revenge kit was an interesting project as a designer,” she said. “The items scared me at first but now I can see how something that is used in an ugly way can be made beautiful. The outcome in our eyes is that the dangerous items look less intimidating but the person you imagine buying them becomes scarier.”

Devine added that feedback from her customers has been good and the project has helped increase sales of the standard tote bag.

“We have had a really positive response to it so far, the women that like our brand/bags have really embraced the dark humour of it and also like the way the items have come together as a set,” she claimed. “We haven’t had anyone contact us attempting to buy a kit yet. We’ve sold a lot of the teal bags without all the nasty additions though.”

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colour-coordinated weapons appeared first on Dezeen.