Hasta La Ideas

As the yellow XR-21 Bluebird school bus traverses across the desert terrain slowly reaching our final destination at Black Rock City in Nevada I catch up as best I can with my fellow passengers. A multidisciplinary group of international research students, architects and writers including a comic illustrator, a futurist and an animator chosen by the talented leaders of our extraordinary mission, Liam Young and Kate Davies of the Unknown Fields Division.

Serving as a platform for speculative inquiry, Liam and Kate along with fellow architect, Merlin Eayrs, curate their journeys as a cross-disciplinary practice seeking to experience first-hand the complex and contradictory nature of changing climates and emerging infrastructural landscapes. Often working with diverse practitioners alongside students from the Architectural Association, UFD will catalogue and document their experiences as a framework to create new narratives and construct potential new futures exploring alternative realities and cultures these extraordinary landscapes may afford.

On journey’s such as this summer’s road trip from Roswell to Burning Man, participants are each given a mission packet containing information on the aims of the trip, and most importantly how and what to prepare for.

This event in particular chronicled:

A series of extraterrestrial encounters from the borderlands, black sites, military outposts and folkloric landscapes, you will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentarian and part science-fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

The Unknown Fields Division Itinerary

One such collaborator on this trip is Mark O. Pilkington, author of Mirage Men, and a key influence to the Unknown Fields Division itinerary which took the group to covert military test sites, the alien technologies of the aeronautics industry and the experimental communities and towns found across the Great West. Beginning their road trip at the Roswell Crash Site and the VLA (Very Large Array) in New Mexico, Mark was able to share his fascinating Mirage Men account of his previous travels around Nevada and the history of “UFOria and its origins in the murky worlds of espionage, psychological warfare and advanced military technology.”

Their journey into disinformation, paranoia and military technologies continued across New Mexico and Arizona with visits to the white sands missile range to explore the Hollowman Airforce base, home to the United States’ drone program, the Virgin Galactic Spaceport and the Titan Missile silo.

From top: White Sands Missile Range, Virgin Galactic Spaceport, Very Large Array and Titan Missile Silo. Photos courtesy of Anouk Ahlborn

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Last year, I went to the first “Technology You Can Touch” mixer—a networking event hosted by NYC Tech Connect to put entrepreneurial engineers and inventors in biotech, materials and other hard sciences in touch with funding opportunities available around New York City. Last week, I went back to catch up on how the community has developed.

There were entrepreneur product demos set up for the duration of the mixer, but the presentation portion of the event actually started out with representatives from various venture funds and accelerator groups giving short pitches about their programs. And while crowd-funding may be all the rage and digital start-ups get a lot of press, there are still millions of investor dollars and accelerator programs available for people innovating with materials, tools, systems, robotics or even retrofitting radiators (to hint at a few). Students, in particular, should make sure to look into what incubators, accelerators or scholarships your institution and communities offer. There are numerous firms out there actively looking for businesses to help get off the ground. We heard from:

• NYC Investment Fund a private fund with a civic mission and one of the founding partners of NYC Tech Connect. They provide a free entrepreneurial advisor with whom you can book advisor time and are running a digital health accelerator.
• NYU Innovation Venture Fund a seed-stage venture capital fund available to NYU students and projects.
• NYC Seed a seed-stage fund for technology entrepreneurs that’s currently accepting applications for a 3-month enterprise accelerator starting in January.
• Golden Seeds an investment firm dedicated to serving and encouraging gender diversity in their funding of life science, consumer products or Internet technology companies. They also offer open office hours and encourage entrepreneurs to come by and learn what investors are looking for.
• ARC Angel Fund investors in seed and early-stage businesses in NYC and the surrounding Northeast to Mid-Atlantic region.
• Lux Capital seeking early stage tech companies with big, “contrary,” industry-changing ideas in energy, technology and healthcare—from innovative nuclear cleanup methods to Shapeways.
• NYC ACRE (Accelerator for a Clean and Renewable Economy) focuses on clean and renewable energy businesses, as well as trying to grow a supportive community in the field. One of their tenant companies, Enertiv, demo-ed at this event.
• NYU-Poly provides a list of the incubators it started around the city.
• And finally, the NY Hardware Start-up Meetup is getting off the ground with its focus on the community of people who want to build businesses with physical products.

While these are obviously NYC-centric organizations, they’re just a small sample of the resources out there supporting designers and entrepreneurs who are making physical objects. Six such entrepreneurs were also on hand demo-ing their projects.

photo via Bitponics.com

Bitponics

Awarded the Open Hardware Summit 2011 scholarship and with a successfully funded Kickstarter, Bitponics works with your hydroponic system by providing a simple plug-and-play device for sensors that assess the state of your garden and programmable power outlets. But Bitponics’ real strength lies in the online component which combining your sensor data with the greater Bitponics Community data to provide recommendations based on your specific conditions. Bitponics is in production (and it looks like we’re finally going to get to crowdsource plants).

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For the last three years the grassroots nonprofit, desigNYC, has been improving the lives of New Yorkers through extraordinary collaborations between pro bono designers and nonprofits. Join this growing community as they celebrate their exhibit opening for “Recharging Communities,” which chronicles the latest round of project collaborations connecting 15 extraordinary organizations with close to 50 talented design professionals who are leaders in the fields of architectural, landscape, interior, experience and communications design.

Highlights from this year’s collaborations feature design solutions across various scales from communications designs for Bard Prison Initiative and Safe Horizon to interior redesigns for SNAP’s training lab and a People’s Federal Credit Union to a green infrastructure landscape design for the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, a streetscape revitalization strategy for LES BID, and master plans for FAB Alliance and Rockaway Development and Revitalization Corporation.

RSVP now for the Exhibit Event at GD Cucine on October 3 from 6 to 8 pm or read more about the projects on desigNYC’s website.

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We’ll take a good hackathon over a brainstorming session any day, and M-RGE is cooking up a design-centric version. The New York-based community for hackers and designers, which has already attracted some 200 members with a two-month run of free workspace and classes at startup farm AlleyNYC, will hold a weekend hackfest on October 13 and 14. The design-minded twist? Designers will pitch developers, and not vice-versa. “In addition, design will be as important in winning as technology,” add the organizers, who promise abundant “food, shwag, and prizes.” Click here for details.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Voltage Mapping Drawings

Fellow participant of the Unknown Fields Division group and Design Interactions student at the Royal College of Art in London Dimitri Constantinides is currently exploring various dystopian themes as part of his final year thesis entitled ‘Post- Traumatic Constellations’. The thesis is a first-hand field guide in which he attempts to analyse and come to terms with the social, cultural, ecological and technological impacts of trauma and post- trauma conditions around the world.

Taking on the persona of a post-traumatic urbanist during the UFD roadtrip his first call of duty was to find the cheapest way to design and install a solar energy power source. Additionally, the device had to store enough energy to address the needs of twenty or so fellow ‘nomad’ travellers keen to not let go of their smart phones and their collection of power usage gadgetry.

Off Grid Bus Diagram

A tall order for most people but not for Dimitri, or Dimi to his close friends, with just $180 and some basic DIY solar energy knowledge, he was able to plan the best way to harvest electricity throughout the two-week road trip from just a few photovoltaic panels, some deep cell batteries and an inverter.

Batteries

Inverter Meter

After making a visit to a selection of hardware stores, three 15-watt photovoltaic panels were strapped and riveted flat to the roof of the bus to collectively gain 45 watts of power. Once connected, power was then stored into a bank of four deep cycle 12-volt lead/acid batteries daisy chained together at the back of the bus to ensure maximum charge.

Ratchet Cables connect to the Solar Panel

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