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The largest part of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we take go through our bodies and eventually end up in waste water. As water and waste treatment plants haven't been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food and drugs we ingest. Tuur van Balen, one of the graduates of Design Interactions at the RCA, decided to explore this issue in a project which imho had the perfect balance between speculation and solid anchorage into reality.
The way people live and behave in each zone of London can be reflected in the quality of the tap water. Tap water in London Notting Hill very probably benefits from the high density of organic shops found in the area. Tap water in the city of London is presumably enhanced with all kinds of stimulants, from caffeine-rich drinks to cocaine. Golders Green which houses an important Jewish community can be expected to 'produce' a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.
Back in January, at the opening of the department work in progress show, Tuur presented My City = My Body, the first chapter of this research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our urban environment. He offered tap water to the visitors of the show and asked them to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. The samples, their biological information and postcodes were then added to a map of London which reveals potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes. The mapping of tap water creates separate territories within the city. Could these areas be the biological counterpart of gated communities?
The next step is a website which helps London inhabitants describe, speculate on, map and share what they think are the unique characteristics of their tap water. The map thus created reveals potential local city-body ecologies, or biotopes. The system will also generate a custom-made label which you can download if you want to sell your own tap water.
That's what the designer did. He went to the hip and organic-addicts frequented Broadway market in Hackney to set up a stall, offer people to "buy" bottles of tap waters, branded with the London area they came from and engage in a discussion about the possibility of new urban biotopes.
You can find various websites which details the quality of various tap waters. But most of the systems employed to analyze water do not check for say, anti-depressant substances or cocaine. What if biotechnology could provide us with cheap detectors?
With the help of bioengineer James Chappell, Imperial College, Tuur developed the concept for a Urban Biogeography tool. The instrument would enable anyone to study the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time by monitoring sewage. With the tool, a tiny amount of sewage can be pumped up and scaned for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, without having to lift a manhole cover.
Using synthetic biology and in particular the biobricks tools, bacteria are programmed to become cheap biosensors. The bacteria-sensors, housed in the small transparent compartments, change colour when oestrogen, antibiotics, Viagra or Prozac are detected in the water. Since synthetic biology is both open source and modular, this instrument can be redesigned to detect other chemicals by any Urban Biogeographer, even amateurs as the technology is becoming increasingly accessible. The set of data thus obtained can be used to influence healthcare or property prices in the area, that of course would be the ideal scenario... All images courtesy of Tuur van Balen. Related: 24c3: Programming DNA - A 2-bit language for engineering biology, Designer Microbes. |
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Funniest project seen at the RCA show. You won't need my explanation, just have a look at the video: Signs of Life was created by Freddie Yauner (of the highest popping toaster in the world fame) a graduate of the Design Products department, Platform 11 . Because it was exhibited where you'd expect to see an emergency exit sign i did believe that it was a real one for a moment. |
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Instead of following my natural instinct and turn this blog into the usual happy bordello where unrelated posts follow one another, i'm going to try and focus my reports over the next few days on the projects i saw last week at the RCA Graduate Summer Show in London.
Revital Cohen's final project at the Design Interactions department looked at how cross-breeding man with machines or other species can open up new design opportunities and a space for debate (see her previous project the Telepresence Frame.) I realize that most of the readers are familiar with this concept of 'design for debate' but to avoid any misunderstanding, let's just remind that design for debate explores how design can be used as a medium to draw attention to the social, cultural and ethical implications of new technologies. The resulting design proposals do not provide answers, but they make complex issues tangible, and therefore debatable (via). Revital's Life Support project looks for way of disconnecting people from the therapeutic machines and cold technologies they are harnessed to. Assistance animals - from guide dogs to psychiatric service dogs and other emotional support animals - unlike machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Would it be possible to go a step further and transform animals into medical devices? This project proposes using animals usually bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement, offering an alternative to inhumane medical therapies.
The first part of the project revolves around a concept of Respiratory Dog. Today greyhound racing remains a very lucrative business. Tens of thousands of these dogs are bred annually in an attempt to create the fastest dogs. Most of them are killed if at any time it is determined that they don't have potential to be good racers. The dogs are a mere commercial product and because they constitute a major expense, many of them are killed as soon as it is determined that they don't have value anymore as a racer at a track.
In 2003 alone, an estimated 7,500 to 20,000 greyhounds were euthanized simply because they couldn't run fast enough. There are more heart-breaking (even for me who could never be accused of being dog's best friend) facts about their sad existence on the PETA website. In Revital's scenario, a pedigreed greyhound spends the first twelve months of his life being trained by the racing industry to chase a lure. Over the next three to five years the dog spends his days at kennels and is taken racing weekly to make profit for its owners. So far, nothing new. However, as soon as its time has come to retire from the racetracks, the greyhound is not euthanised (as happens nowadays to thousands of retired greyhounds), it is collected by the NHS and goes through complimentary training in order to become a respiratory assistance dog. When training is completed, the greyhound is adopted by a patient dependent on mechanical ventilation and begins a second career as a respiratory 'device'. The greyhound and its new owner develop a relationship of mutual reliance through keeping each other alive.
A new apparatus is used to converts the greyhound's lung movement into mechanical ventilation: the dog is fitted with a harness and placed on a treadmill where it will start running, stimulated by the same mechanical lure employed in its previous training. The treadmill functions as the interface and on/off switch. The harness uses the dog's rapid chest movement to pump a bellows that pushes air into the patient's lungs.
A second scenario envisions substituting a dialysis machine with a sheep. The concept is inspired by several advances of science such as the creation of cows and sheep cloned to have human blood in their bodies. Much research is also carried out to design animals which would carry organs compatible with humans. When one organ would be needed for transplantation the animal would probably be killed to provide the precious body part. On the other hand, current, mechanical, dialysis treatments are far from being perfect. Revital's scenario imagine that, in the future, a patient suffering from kidney failure would give a blood sample to lab scientists who then isolate in the genome the regions that code for blood production (bone marrow tissues), and immune response (the major histocompatibility complex), extract the genome from the nucleus of a somatic cell taken from a sheep and substitute the corresponding regions of the sheep's genome with the DNA from the patients' genome. This recombinant DNA is then inserted into the nucleus of a pre-prepared sheep egg cell. After cell division in the egg is initiated, the egg is implanted into a surrogate ewe which will eventually give birth to a transgenic lamb.
During the day, the dialysis sheep roams in the donor patient's back garden, grazes to cleanse its kidneys, and drinks water containing salt minerals, calcium and glucose. At night, the sheep is placed at the patient's bedside. The transgenic sheep's kidneys are connected via blood lines to the patient's fistula (a surgically enlarged vein). During the night, waste products from the patient's blood are pumped out of the body, filtered through the sheep's kidney and the blood is returned, cleaned, to the patient. This happens over and over again throughout the night. The day after, the sheep urinates the toxins. Related: Utility Pets, myBio dolls, The Race, health benefits of robotic pets. |
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Another project from the RCA Design Interactions show. This one made me laugh so much: In wealthier neighbourhoods, the size of the house and how well maintained the garden is, often represents status. The Grass Scanner is a device designed by Alice Wang to measure how green the grass is. Using 3 Pantone Color Cue devices, it takes reading from 3 random patches of the grass and outputs a Pantone colour code for one to compare. With the codes, one can refer to the PARKTONE cards which contains average grass colours of Royal Parks and other green areas in the UK for people to match up with their own garden.
As grass condition in different areas of a given park may vary, each area was measured several times before an average of the data was used to create the PARKTONE card. Relate: Mugs for a perfect tea. |
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News from the graduate summer show at the Royal College of Art in London.
Quite a few projects made my day over there. The ones of Yuri Suzuki for example. That guy is so talented it should be illegal. He's an artist, musician and now a fresh graduate from the Design Products department. His project is concerned with revamping and giving new forms and meanings to the almost obsolete turntable, a device which very few of us still have in their house. We don't buy disks of CDs anymore either. Nowadays music is more abstract and immaterial than ever. Sound has been reduced to data.
Sound Chaser looks like a little toy train that rides on record rails. You can align and connect each chipped pieces of second-hand records one to another and compose a new track that the train will play.
The TipTap, developed in collaboration with Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, is a little hammer that reveals the dormant sounds around us. A small metal tapper housed in the object taps out a rhythm on any object or surface that you hold it near to. The rhythm is set either by the user or can be defined by the controller. Alternatively, a beat can be taken from your favourite record, allowing you to play along while keeping perfectly in time. The TipTap can also synchronise with other users to make a social tapping experience.
The Prepared Turntable is an analogue answer to the digitalized DJ. The turntable has 5 tone arms, each of which can have its volume controlled by its own fader. Users can make or play music with special loop groove records.
The Finger Player is a wearable record player. Insert your fingers into one of the little rings, play the record just by holding your hand over the disk and feel the physicality of making sound.
Sound Jewellery conceives sound as something precious that you can offer to a friend or wear as a memory of a shared laugher, a romantic conversation, any sound moment from your daily life. The record is made up of components which of course you can play but they can also be worn as bracelet, brooch or other pieces of jewellery. Related: Turntable Orchestra, Computer/Turntable hybrid, The Turnatable Microwave, video turntable, the Tri-phonic Turntable, etc. All images courtesy of Yuri Suzuki. |
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Another prototype spotted at the RCA work in progress show a few weeks ago in London. This week: In Memory of the Sparrow
As new wireless technologies are introduced, using various frequencies and power levels, an invisible energy is increasingly altering our habitat. There are no conclusive results from research to indicate the influence of this energy on our health or our environment, but studies have shown that sparrow populations are decreasing in areas that are affected by electromagnetic communication.
The object harnesses the very force that drove birds away, and transforms it into subtle bird-like sounds, acting both as a comfort to those who want to remember the sparrows, but also as a poignant reminder that our surroundings contain a level of complexity that surpasses our senses. They are "memorial to the sparrows." I asked Cathrine how exactly the bird-like sound was created. "In the exhibition the bird sound was orchestrated, because to work the radio would have to be grounded and this was not possible within the exhibition space," she explained. "However, in the future scenario I envisioned, these memorials would be mounted to trees and tuned to pick up bird sounds transmitted on an AM frequency bandwidth. The antenna would be a long wire spiraling up the tree to pick up the radio waves." All images courtesy of Cathrine Kramer. |
