Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg discusses synthetic biology – a new field of science that could see designers creating artificial lifeforms.

For example, bacteria could one day be developed to excrete brightly coloured pigments when they detect disease inside your body, alerting you via vividly coloured poo.

Synthetic biology is a development of the age-old practice of selective breeding, Ginsberg explains: “We’ve been designing biology for 10,000 years or more,” she says. “Every crop, or your pet dog – it has all been designed in a way. It’s been iterated and iterated by human decisions into the thing that we want. The idea behind synthetic biology is that you can get much more control and start moving things across living kingdoms that haven’t interacted at a genetic level before.”

Ginsberg gives the example of E.chromi, a project she worked on with fellow designer James King and undergraduate students at Cambridge University, which won the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in 2009. “It’s a competition where thousands of students from around the world get together to design a bacteria that does something cool,” she explains. “We were working with students at Cambridge who were designing bacteria that produce different coloured pigments.”

As part of the project, Ginsberg and her team considered the possible future applications and implications of their work. “We imagined that in about 2039 it would become culturally acceptable to drink a Yakult-type yoghurt laced with E.chromi bacteria that would start to detect diseases in your gut,” she says. “If you had a disease they’d start producing a corresponding coloured pigment. So coloured poo is the thing that everyone has taken from this project, as a new kind of interface for biological computing.”

Not content to simply present the project as a series of diagrams, Ginsberg and King created a mock-up of what the imagined excrement might look like. “We wanted to challenge the scientists and engineers who are actually inventing the technology with what we thought was an interesting aesthetic response,” She explains. “They’re representing it as cogs and machines, but this is biology. We shouldn’t be shy or coy about talking about what’s unique about this technology.”

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

The post “We’ve been designing biology
for 10,000 years” appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2013: designer Daniel Rybakken will launch a table lamp that dims as it’s pushed down a thin vertical stand at Euroluce in Milan this week. 

The intensity of the light alters as the position of the aluminium head is adjusted, dimming and eventually turning off as it reaches the table.

The ability to change the shade’s position also enables the user to choose how far the light spreads.

The product for Luceplan is called Ascent and comes in two versions: one with an anchor bolt, the other with a base.

Daniel Rybakken used the same head as on Counterbalance, a wall-mounted lamp he created for the same brand last year.

Ascent will be presented at Euroluce in Milan from 9 to 14 April. Other lighting designs to be launched in Milan include a folding table lamp by Nika Zupanc and the glass 57 Series by Omer Arbel.

Other lighting projects by Rybakken include A lamp that filters light through layers of coloured screens and a series of LED panels that replicate daylight on a dark staircase in Stockholm.

Here’s some more information from the designer:

Ascent uses the same archetypical head found on Counterbalance (Luceplan 2012), mounted on a slender vertical stem. By moving the head along the stem, the light intensity goes from being turned off at the bottom position, to gradually ascending to the full light output at the top. This gives the user control over not only the light intensity, but also the spread of the light.

The visual elements of Ascent are all recognizable, from the classic head to the round stem, but it is the way you use Ascent that makes it different from existing lights. The gesture of sliding the head upwards for more light and down for less is a conceptual idea, but at the same time an action that feels natural.

Ascent comes in two versions, with an anchor bolt for tables, or with a base. The anchor bolt is made impact resistant by having a co-molding of steel and rubber in the base, allowing up to 15 degree of tilt of the stem. As to protecting the inner mechanics and electronics the head is made to rotate freely. These measures make Ascent suitable for larger public spaces as well as for domestic use.

Head in aluminium, stem in technopolymer, 10W LED – 2700K light source.

The post Ascent lamp by Daniel Rybakken
for Luceplan appeared first on Dezeen.

1. AIPAD Photography Show The Park Avenue Armory in NYC is currently playing host to the AIPAD Photography Show, one of the year’s most impressive gatherings of contemporary photography talent. For those unable to make the show, ); return…

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Google Creative Lab creative director Alexander Chen explains how he created a digital string you can pluck like a viola and discusses Google Glass and the future of user interface design in this movie we filmed at Design Indaba in Cape Town last month. 

Chen presented a number of his personal projects at Design Indaba, which involve novel ways of making music on a computer. “I grew up playing the viola and I’ve always written and recorded my own music,” he explains. “I was learning that alongside computer programming and visual design [so] I always wanted to combine the things together.”

For a project called Mta.me, Chen created a virtual stringed instrument based on the New York subway system (above). “I’d just moved to New York and I started to think ‘what if the lines on the subway map could be a musical instrument?'” he says.

In Chen’s map, the different subway routes become strings, which vibrate at different frequencies based on their length. Chen then animated the map so that the strings are plucked by other subway lines that intersect them. “I took it one step further,” he says. “I looked up the subway schedule and using computer code had the subway performing itself.”

Chen then goes on to talk about his work at Google Creative Lab, where he helped to produce the original concept video for Google Glass, as well as the final movie demonstrating the new user interface, which Google released in February.

He believes that wearable technology like Google Glass demonstrates how digital technology in future will be more integrated into our lives. “Technology continues to disappear more and more,” he says. “I don’t know if I want to make any strong predictions, but I hope that technology disappears more and more from my life and you forget that you’re using it all the time instead of feeling like you’re burdened [by it].

“I hope it becomes more like the water running in our house and the electricity running through our buildings: we use it when we need it and then we forget about it for the rest of the day and just enjoy being people.”

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

The post “Digital technology will
continue to disappear” appeared first on Dezeen.

by Nicole Rupersburg As the automotive capital of the world, Detroit is known for the Big Three—GM, Ford and Chrysler. But a new player in town, Detroit Electric, aims to make a name for electric automotive…

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